Rebecca Schwengber views herself as a first stop for the highly-educated person who comes to Minnesota and doesn’t speak a lot of English. Her business, Language Sprout, works with schools and school districts across the Twin Cities Metro area to teach a variety of languages, and she wants her teachers to speak their native language to the kids.
She employs a lot of people, and now, her business is being thrown into uncertainty.
Twenty-two of her employees are Venezuelan, and in two months, because of decisions made by the Trump administration, their legal status will expire and they will be forced to leave – sent back to the life-threatening authoritarianism they tried to flee in Venezuela.
“I don’t have a single person, that’s Venezuelan on my staff, that doesn’t at least have a master’s degree,” she said. “They’re highly educated. Seven of them have bought houses in the last year. They are the best members of the community.”
Over 100 years after the United States shut its doors to Jewish immigrants fleeing oppression – practically condemning the Jews of Europe to be murdered in the Holocaust – American Jews are now seeing a new anti-immigrant fervor reach its peak with the second Trump administration.
This time, it may not be targeting Jews. But the community is sensitive to the plight of others fleeing to the United States for a better, safer life. Jewish organizations and lawyers have also helped build the refugee and asylum system (key to the resettlement of Soviet Jews) that President Donald Trump is intent on dismantling.
With 100 years of integration in this country, Jews in Minnesota, like elsewhere, will now be part of this new national project against immigrants – either as bystanders, or by actively supporting or fighting this movement.
Schwengber agreed to speak with TC Jewfolk, and make her employees available for interviews, because she believes in standing against Trump’s efforts. She is a Jewish Minnesotan who, in addition to working with the Latino community for more than 20 years, is married to a Latino immigrant, and her oldest daughter works in the Latino immigrant community in a different state.
Schwengber’s employees are Venezuelan citizens who are living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. TPS is used to designate countries with “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevent citizens from being safe, and allows them to stay and work in the United States. Venezuela is choked by a violent military dictatorship under strongman Nicolás Maduro.
On Feb. 5, the 2023 TPS status of roughly 350,000 Venezuelans was revoked, marking them for deportation on April 7. Those who received TPS status in 2021 – another 250,000 – have those protections until Sept. 10.
If it comes to it, Schwengber has told her employees to seek refuge at a synagogue. She is Jewish and, professionally, works with Catholic churches; she’s more confident in the ability for her workers to find protection at a synagogue, and thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be less likely to come forcibly into a synagogue than a church.
“I don’t know if that’s just [because] we have a culture of help, and we have an empathy for starting over, and migration, and part of our value system is Tikkun Olam (repairing the world),” Schwengber said.
Schwengber said she takes a very liberal stance on pikuach nefesh, the Jewish value of saving a life – in this case, making sure people that are fleeing persecution don’t have to go back to certain harm.
Schwengber said that right now, people are being “bombarded with media propaganda” about how bad immigrants are. She doesn’t want her employees – and the vast majority of the immigrant community – to be confused with gangs like Tren de Aragua, the transnational criminal organization and U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization which operates throughout South America and some parts of the United States.
Immigrants, meanwhile, are scared of sharing their stories publicly – leaving little to combat anti-immigrant rhetoric. For Schwengber, that means more people like her need to speak up since the immigrant population may not feel as free to do so.
“The second they do, who the hell knows who’s going to show up at their door to get them,” she said. “I’m married to a Latino immigrant. I work in the Latino immigrant population. I’m not afraid of my government coming [for me].
“People who know these stories need to start speaking up. Otherwise I worry about what this looks like in a year.”
Facing persecution
Luis and Mileidy (not their real names to protect their identity) are two of Schwengber’s Venezuelan employees. Both with advanced degrees – Mileidy was a competitive volleyball player with a master’s in education before going to law school and becoming a labor lawyer at a petroleum company. Luis was a captain in the Venezuelan military who graduated college from that country’s version of West Point.
Mileidy has been in Minnesota for five and a half years; she came to the U.S. when her daughter got a scholarship and visa to play tennis as a teen, but when that expired, she applied for asylum due to persecution she underwent.
“When the government said there was TPS, I applied for that, [too],” she said.
When she worked for one of the petroleum companies, her role was to investigate internal crimes. She was told to “remove pages, forget some things, omit other things,” she said, with Schwengber acting as interpreter.
She did not participate in any marches supporting dictator Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor as president, or Maduro. Because of that, she was accused of being for the opposition party.
“They would come and threaten me with, ‘We know where you live,’” Mileidy said, especially after she left the company.
What terrified her most was when roads would be closed by gangs unless she bribed them. She was told at the gang checkpoint that she had to go back and do what they said.
“I knew, in that moment, I was being persecuted because I wouldn’t do and approve things that weren’t correct,” she said.
Said Schwengber: “She was suffering. Her mental health was suffering. She would be afraid to take the kids to the park.”
Jailbreak
Luis had been a staunch believer that members of the military should be apolitical – to the point that, if you were in the military, you shouldn’t vote in Venezuelan elections.
Meanwhile, Chavez and Maduro politicized the military, bought off leadership, and used their vote to stay in power.
“The military bases should have been without any propaganda in them…and people who are active, serving military on the bases, should not have been wearing any clothing that would have denoted their political stance,” he said, via Schwengber.
“The problem was that if you were wearing something that coordinated with the Chavez government, there was no problem,” he said. “To wear something in opposition to Chavez – you’d have a big problem.”
Luis stuck to his apolitical stance; many of his superior officers did not. But outranking him, there was nothing he could do about it. But he could stop those who were ranked below him. And did.
But stepping up came at a cost; he went from being a highly-ranked officer who got good postings, to being demoted, which came with less desirable jobs.
What caused the most issues for Luis was when he refused to sign paperwork that stated a batch of Russian-made Su-35 fighter jets had undergone required maintenance when they had not.
“There started to be a lot of disappearing money, and so the amount of money that they had to do this maintenance became less and less,” he said. “So they wanted me to continue to sign orders saying that these planes could continue to fly without having their maintenance.”
He was called a saboteur of the armed forces by high-ranking officers for his refusal.
“The issues Luis had are similar to Mileidy’s: The fact that there are systems, and an order in which we do things, and these government officials would be asking to have no documentation [when corrupting the system] and refusing to have any responsibility,” Schwengber said.
One evening, he was home watching television when five intelligence service members came to his home. He tried talking to them through the door, but they brought a battering ram to knock the door down. Luis’s son, then 11, was trying to hold onto his father but had his arm broken and he was pushed aside.
For two months he was in solitary confinement. His wife visited him once, and after she was aggressively stripped searched, he told her not to visit again. He told her to sell everything and go to Colombia.
In the meantime, Luis tracked the rotation of the guards to know who was watching his cell. One night, his guard, who had a girlfriend nearby, left his post for 15 minutes. Luis grabbed a uniform and snuck off base.
While in uniform, he got a truck driver to take him to Caracas, and then another who took him to Colombia, where he reunited with his family. After a fruitless stop at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, they eventually made it to Mexico City and then to Mexicali. One night, 12 people crammed into a seven-person Honda Pilot crossed the border into the United States. They went by foot to the highway where they were picked up by authorities – which was his goal – in order to claim asylum.
After two days in a migrant center, they were let go. But he had a month with an ankle bracelet where he was tracked. Up until a year ago, he was getting emails that he had to answer about what he was doing.
“His lawyer says that his probability of being able to get asylum is high, but my… fear is – we just saw this wave-of-a-wand removal of TPS for people who can’t go back,” Schwengber said. “We have a whole team of ‘can’t go back.’”
President Trump is already trying to shut down the asylum system, and is being taken to court for those efforts.
TPS vs. Asylum
Mileidy’s Temporary Protected Status is from 2021, so it expires in September. Luis’s is from 2023, so it’s in the batch expiring in April. But both have asylum applications open, and they can stay in the country while the applications are processed (though the Trump administration may attempt to change that).
“The TPS would have allowed her to stay here regardless of whether or not her pending asylum was rejected,” Schwengber said.
TPS is, as the name suggests, a “status,” which asylum is not. TPS allows travel out of the country, which asylum seekers cannot do before the hearing.
“TPS has advantages and disadvantages,” Luis said. “But because TPS was here and reliable, I think there’s a lot of people who don’t have their asylum status that they’re waiting for as well.”
In most cases, asylum has to be applied for within the first year of being in the country, which, if they didn’t know that upon entry, immigrants may have little recourse as TPS is phased out.
Those in the U.S. under TPS also faced a bit of whiplash, as the Biden Administration extended TPS for those who were due to expire in April through October 2026. Three weeks later is when the Trump administration canceled the extension.
According to Robert Aronson, a retired immigration attorney and former board chair of HIAS, the Jewish refugee advocacy and aid organization, TPS stems from an executive order, and lacks the power of law that something passed by Congress would have.
“It’s more flimsy. It lacks that kind of imprimatur,” he said. “Asylum is grounded in the law. It says that if someone’s on the territory of the United States and they fear persecution, they have the right to seek safety, and that’s a statutory provision.”
For how long? That’s another question. Trump has already halted new asylum cases from being brought forward, but with the existing ones – like those of Luis and Mileidy – those can still go forward because of the United States Refugee Act of 1980. That law adopted the United Nations’ definition of refugee, and provided the first statutory basis for asylum.
“When it comes to immigration, this administration deals in a very binary world: You’re either in or out. There are no greys. There’s no nuance,” Aronson said. “The focus is on this removal of foreign nationals, and you can say that the end game is Christian nationalism, white power or whatever, but they certainly have found an issue that – at least in the campaign – resonated. And it resonated because of an absolutely broken down asylum system.”
Earlier this week, HIAS joined a lawsuit against Trump with two other refugee resettlement agencies over the president’s executive order that suspended the refugee resettlement program.
“This new version of a refugee ban is both illegal and immoral,” said HIAS President Mark Hetfield in a statement. “HIAS will always fight for the rights and safety of refugees, and for the vision of the U.S. as a haven that welcomes people who flee persecution. The American Jewish community owes its very existence to those times when the United States opened its doors to refugees fleeing anti-Semitism and persecution. We know the stakes right now, and we are rising to meet the moment.”
Despite the Trump administration not extending TPS, it’s something he has tried before. During the first Trump term, legal challenges blocked decisions not to extend TPS for several countries.
Legislative remedy going nowhere
A bi-partisan mix of 14 House members plus the non-voting resident commissioner of Puerto Rico have sponsored a bill called the “Venezuelan Adjustment Act” which would provide for “all Venezuelan citizens who have been present by December 31, 2021, to obtain legal Permanent Residence.” After that date, with one year and one day of presence in the U.S., they can apply for an adjustment of their status. A petition drive is trying to get 500,000 signatures to support the legislation moving forward.
The legislation was referred to the House Judiciary Committee last year but the bill didn’t go anywhere beyond that. Florida Rep. Darren Soto, the lead author of the bill, also introduced the legislation in the previous Congressional session in 2022. A staffer in his office said that he has introduced it again in the current Congress, but there is no record of that yet.
What awaits Schwengber’s employees – and the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who’ve fled a repressive regime – is uncertain.
The first Trump administration called the situation in Venezuela a humanitarian crisis. According to the archived State Department website about the situation, they wrote that Venezuela “currently suffers under the repressive and corrupt misrule of the dictator Nicolas Maduro and his illegitimate regime,” and recognized and supported then-interim President Juan Guaido.
Also, the State Department and Drug Enforcement Agency currently lists a $25 million reward for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Maduro for narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and other charges.
However, the current Trump administration, in ending the TPS protections, said it’s fine for migrants to return home.
“What is coming up in Venezuela media right now, is that the people who are being sent back have been trained by Washington to overthrow the Maduro government,” which makes her employees even more fearful about being forced back, Schwengber said.
Under TPS, Luis could travel to see his parents in Colombia or Brazil, and trust that he would be let back into the U.S. Now, he can’t take the risk. Both Mileidy and Luis have family that they’ve left behind, and all of them understand why they can’t come back.
“They all say, ‘Don’t return,’” Mileidy said.
