Border patrol grabs Venezuelan parents in D.C. despite protected status | Their arrests, weeks before TPS is set to expire for many Venezuelans, raised alarms that the Trump administration is again willing to separate parents and children

> The Venezuelan couple — exhausted after a six-week journey north through an unforgiving jungle and gritty cities — waded across the southern border in Texas with their three children in 2022, part of a historic wave of migrants seeking refuge from economic and political turmoil who are now seeing the ground shift beneath them in the United States.

> The couple, who *The Washington Post* is identifying only by their middle names Cesar and Norelia, and their three children were allowed in the country by Border Patrol. Later, the Department of Homeland Security granted them temporary protected status — a legal promise of security against being deported to the country they fled. They settled in a D.C. neighborhood with their children — ages 4, 9 and 13 — received Social Security numbers, a driver’s license for Cesar and new jobs cleaning hotels. They gave immigration officials their address.

> Then on Monday, every legal safeguard they thought was in place was seemingly upended. With two of their children looking on, screaming and crying, Border Patrol arrested the couple in D.C., removing them from their home in handcuffs on a misdemeanor charge of illegally crossing the border more than two years ago, according to court records, a video capturing a portion of the arrests, and interviews with them and their family. The family was apart for three days. By Thursday evening, the couple was back in their home with an order to appear in an El Paso federal court in 30 days to answer for the illegal border crossing.

> The arrests, weeks before temporary protected status is set to expire for several hundred thousand Venezuelans, immediately raised alarms among immigrant advocates that the Trump administration is undertaking a new strategy as it seeks to execute mass deportations. Advocacy groups say they are investigating whether the government is violating a 2023 court settlement that prohibits separating children from their parents based on illegal border crossings, the same minor crime the first Trump administration used in 2018 to justify separating families at the southern border under a “zero tolerance” policy. It was unclear Friday why this couple was targeted for arrest and what it might mean for others who have temporary protected status after they, too, crossed illegally.

> “They saw them handcuff their father and mother,” the children’s grandfather, Gregorio, said in an interview on Thursday. “The children were watching.”

!ping IMMIGRATION&USA-DMV

First They Came for the Immigrants, but I said nothing for I was not an immigrant.