‘Our Hopes Would Fall Apart’: A Venezuelan Family’s Fight to Stay in the U.S. — and Stay Documented

In recent years, nearly a million Venezuelans have fled to the U.S. to escape their country’s political and economic turmoil under President Nicolás Maduro. More than 700,000 of them were granted temporary legal status through various programs under the Biden administration.

Once President Donald Trump took office for the second time this January, his administration quickly moved to end those temporary protections – part of an immigration crackdown the administration said was necessary to protect the U.S. from what it called an “invasion” of “illegal aliens.”

The crackdown meant that the status of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who had fled Maduro’s Venezuela was suddenly clouded with uncertainty.

Among those people was a woman named Yineska, who had been building a life near Doral, Florida, with her partner and her two teenage sons since 2023.

“They had welcomed us for two years,” says Yineska in the above video drawn from the new documentary Status: Venezuelan. “To have your hopes suddenly cut off — it’s as if you’re standing on a rug that’s pulled from under you and you fall.”

From ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Status: Venezuelan follows Yineska and her family as they try to stay together and maintain their legal status while navigating rapidly shifting immigration policies.

In the above video, Yineska reacts to the news that the Trump administration is seeking to suspend temporary protections for Venezuelan migrants.

“Last night I didn’t sleep,” she says. “Who would have imagined that practically all our hopes would fall apart?”

After she and her partner, Eduard, meet with an immigration lawyer and try to figure out how to keep their legal status, Yineska, who like Eduard is seeking asylum, remains fearful about their future in the U.S.

“Before you go to court, they can issue a deportation order, send immigration to where you are, and that’s it, it’s over,” Yineska says.

Says Eduard: “I feel even more scared.”

"To have your hopes suddenly cut off — it’s as if you’re standing on a rug that’s pulled from under you and you fall."

Elsewhere in the film, Eduard explains why he and his family are trying so hard to keep their legal status: “They’re taking people into custody. Mass deportations. The raids,” he says. “That’s why we want to do things right, so they don’t catch us out there on the street.”

Following a Supreme Court ruling in the Trump administration’s favor this fall, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have lost their temporary protected status and now face possible deportation. As tensions rise between the U.S. and Venezuela and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown continues, Status: Venezuelan is a timely look at what life is like for Venezuelans in the U.S. who have been living in limbo, and who fear being persecuted if they’re forced to return to the country they fled.

“I’m aware that I’m an immigrant, that I have to obey the laws so my stay can be extended,” Yineska says in the documentary as she awaits a response to her asylum application. “But something changes every day. The truth is that you’re waiting to see, now what are they going to say? What is going to happen with our future, exactly?”

For the full story, watch Status: Venezuelan starting Dec. 9, 2025 on FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s YouTube channels, at pbs.org/frontline and propublica.org, and in the PBS App. The documentary will premiere on PBS stations at 10/9c (check local listings) and will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. Status: Venezuelan is a ProPublica production that is part of the FRONTLINE FEATURES initiative. The director is Mauricio Rodríguez Pons. The senior producers are Frank Koughan and Lisa Riordan Seville. Almudena Toral is ProPublica’s executive producer and ProPublica’s editor-in-chief is Stephen Engelberg. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. Status: Venezuelan leads a two-part broadcast hour that also includes Surviving CECOT, a short documentary telling the story of three Venezuelan men who were deported by the Trump administration to a maximum-security Salvadoran prison.