Doral, Florida is a Miami suburb nicknamed “Doralzuela” for its large Venezuelan population. In 2024 many immigrants in Doral enthusiastically backed Donald Trump as he ran for president, even as he was calling for mass deportations and claiming that immigrants were eating dogs and cats.
Doral voted for Trump with about 62% of the vote.
Today many of those voters say they feel abandoned and betrayed by Trump’s immigration agenda.
Many of those voters relied on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), first granted to Venezuelans in 2021 and expanded under the Biden administration, which allowed hundreds of thousands to live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation.
That protection began unraveling this year. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved to terminate TPS for Venezuela, and in October the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way by upholding the administration’s authority to end the program.
New regulations mean more than half a million Venezuelans nationwide could eventually lose their status, including large numbers in South Florida. Venezuelan community leaders in Doral have described the shift as “beyond betrayal,” organizing protests and legal clinics as families brace for work permits to expire and removal orders to resume.
Some residents are already leaving Doral altogether, worried that deportation to Caracas could soon include them.
The Trump administration defends the rollback as a matter of security and law. Officials argue that TPS was always meant to be temporary and say the program has been “abused,” pointing to claims — disputed by advocates — that Venezuela released prisoners and psychiatric patients toward the U.S. border.
Even in Doral, some Venezuelans still support Trump’s hard line, believing pressure on Maduro is worth the risk and that migrants with clean records will ultimately find legal paths to stay. But for many families who once saw Trump as their champion, Doral now feels less like a refuge and more like a place where the future is suddenly uncertain.
The new PBS Frontline documentary “Status: Venezuelan” airs Tuesday night on PBS stations and streaming on the PBS app. The film, produced in collaboration with ProPublica, follows one Venezuelan family in Florida as they try to stay together — and stay documented — amid President Donald Trump’s renewed immigration crackdown.
Through intimate scenes and extensive reporting, the documentary shows parents juggling work, school and legal appointments while they anxiously watch shifting rules around Temporary Protected Status and other protections that once allowed many Venezuelans to live and work legally in the United States.
“Status: Venezuelan” places that family’s story inside the larger Venezuelan migration crisis, one of the biggest population displacements in the world, driven by economic collapse and political repression under Maduro.
Guest:
Mauricio Rodriguez Pons is the director of FRONTLINE: Status: Venezuelan.
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This episode will be recorded on Tuesday, December 9, 2025, at 12:00 p.m.
