Jose Perez, a Venezuelan attorney who arrived in Chicago in 2019, had been contemplating going back to his home country for months.Rather than risk deportation after President Donald Trump’s administration revoked his temporary protected status last year along with thousands of other Venezuelans, Perez consulted with family members, carefully planned his return and bought a plane ticket for Jan. 7.Then, four days before he was supposed to fly home, he watched as U.S. armed forces conducted an overnight raid to capture and arrest Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro.Worried that his home country will experience even further destabilization, Perez has decided not to leave — at least not yet.“What I'm really hoping for is that this situation will either come to an end or that measures will be taken to allow Venezuelans to return to their country normally,” Perez said in Spanish.The U.S. military intervention in Venezuela has led to renewed calls for the Trump administration to accept Venezuelans seeking asylum and to reinstate “Temporary Protected Status” for Venezuelan migrants. The designation allows eligible noncitizens to work legally in the United States and shields them from deportation as their immigration or asylum cases play out. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to cancel TPS for 350,000 immigrants from Venezuela and thousands more from other countries.While some in Chicago’s Venezuelan immigrant community are happy that Maduro has been deposed, many are worried the action will further destabilize their home country. Rather than making their potential return safer, many Venezuelans, like Perez, fear the conditions will worsen — deepening their need for protections to remain in the United States.“There are many mixed feelings right now,” Ana Gil Garcia of the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance said in Spanish. “We have many people waiting for their situation regarding TPS to be clarified, and also for their asylum cases to be resolved.” Related Chicago’s Venezuelan community applauds Maduro removal but questions Trump’s motives Gil Garcia fears that Venezuelans won’t be granted any legal pathways to stay in the United States because the Trump administration believes that by removing Maduro, “things in Venezuela have supposedly been resolved, when the opposite is true,” she said. “Now there is more fear than ever because no one knows how the country will act or how ordinary citizens will find peace.”Perez, who was planning to leave Chicago on Wednesday, said he realized in recent months that it would be difficult for him to live a normal life after he lost his TPS.After seeing all the immigration arrests happening in Little Village this fall and how hard it was for people to make a case in court, Perez said he knew he could get arrested and deported at any time.“I was living under a lot of uncertainty and fear,” Perez said.And while he said many Venezuelans are celebrating Maduro’s capture, the same “criminal” political infrastructure is still in power in Venezuela. So that uncertainty about his future has only grown since the United States captured Maduro.“Given the instability created by President Trump's reckless and illegal military action in Venezuela, Mayor Johnson renews the call for Temporary Protected Status and the opportunity to apply for asylum for the Venezuelan migrant community navigating the uncertainty caused by the Trump administration,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement this week.Asked about a similar plea by Miami’s mayor, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Fox News appearance that immigrants who had TPS could apply for refugee status. But the law says that only those who are currently abroad are eligible to apply.“We need to make sure that our programs actually mean something and that we are following the law," Noem said.The Department of Homeland Security added in an X post that “President Trump is bringing stability to Venezuela.“Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love.” Related Timeline of Venezuelans in Chicago But Mauricio Tenorio, a history professor at the University of Chicago, disagrees. He said there are only a few examples of U.S. military intervention in Latin America that had even debatable success, whether measured by the furtherance of American political interests or the population's well-being. The vast majority of interventions have proven to be "total failures" that did not stabilize countries, he said."By and large, most of it is not even debatable, it's a mess," Tenorio said.In this case, the Trump administration's "incoherence" in explaining its actions in Venezuela and its lack of a plan for what comes next means there will be no progress in Venezuela that would allow people to return, Tenorio said. Meanwhile, there appears to be no willingness to grant Venezuelan immigrants increased access to asylum or protected status.That leaves Venezuelan nationals, whether they live there or are seeking asylum here in the United States in a difficult position."In terms of the terrible human crisis that Venezuela has been in for the last 15 years, this means absolutely nothing," Tenorio said of the U.S. raid, saying it represented Trump showing off militarily rather than any substantive change. "The administration is not even calling for the freedom of political prisoners. It's not calling for anything else. It's the same, but without Maduro."What they're going to produce is more immigration," he said. "It's stupidity and lack of human sense and total ignorance of history." ...read more read less