The Rodriguez family goes to sleep each night knowing it could be their last in this country.
They are legally in the U.S., but earlier this year, President Donald Trump ended the humanitarian parole program that gave them their status. Since then, the family has faced a legal and emotional rollercoaster as their case moves through the federal court system.
Juan Rodriguez, his wife Ana and daughter Leticia do their best to put on a brave face as they tell their story in a south Tulsa cafe. But it’s clear that strong feelings lie just beneath the surface.
“We know we’ve done everything right and we should be protected for now,” Juan explained. “But still there’s that fear that agents could knock on the door at any time and take us away.”
La Semana is using pseudonyms for the Rodriguez family due to credible fear of retaliation from government authorities.
Increasing violence 15 years ago forced the family to flee their homeland of Venezuela for neighboring Colombia, a time in her life that still gives Leticia nightmares.
“It was dangerous because if you show that you have a car or anything of value, then you are at risk,” she said. “My dad got robbed, and he almost got killed because they had a gun. I got robbed in front of my house, and with a gun, too. My brother also got robbed, and those were the kind of situations that were normal, and that are still normal in Venezuela today.”
Leticia said she couldn’t pursue her education because life on campus was extremely risky, with the government cracking down hard on student protests.
“There were lots of young people who were killed in those protests,” she said.
They soon found they had escaped one danger only to face another filled with its own challenges. Their years in Colombia helped the Rodriguez family regroup, but living as refugees wasn’t easy. Although the Colombian government granted them shelter, the large number of displaced people strained the system. The family could feel the pressure, especially at the local level.
“In Colombia, even though we had a work permit, it didn’t allow us to purchase housing, rent a home or obtain bank loans, which kept us stuck at just one point in our lives,” Juan said. “We weren’t moving forward and it was very hard to apply for jobs. I was only able to work as a freelancer.”
He said the family felt a growing sense of xenophobia and resentment on the part of their hosts. It was due in part, they said, to the fact that some of the criminals they had sought to escape had also come to Colombia.
“They committed crimes there, and that harmed the reputation of all Venezuelans,” he said.
After a two-year process of finding sponsors, submitting applications, paying fees and undergoing thorough background checks, the family finally arrived in Tulsa in July 2024 after receiving humanitarian parole under the Biden-era program for Venezuelans. They were issued Social Security numbers, work authorizations and obtained driver’s licenses.
Juan works two jobs, and the trio shares an apartment with another family to help make ends meet. Both Ana and Leticia had been working as well — until last month, when Ana’s employer let her go over concerns about the validity of her work permit while the family’s case remains undecided.
Now, on a reduced budget and uncertain about what might happen from one day to the next, the family must be cautious with every penny.
“It’s the inability to do some of the ordinary things in life that gets me sometimes,” Leticia confessed. “For instance, we have almost no furniture in our apartment, because we don’t know how long we’ll be here, and we might need the money if we’re forced to go back to Venezuela.”
Following the rules — until the rules changed
The Rodriguez family said they have followed government rules at every stage. They were allowed to enter the U.S., received work permits, and have been paying taxes in full compliance with federal law. That’s why it was especially hard when the Rodríguezes found out on March 25 that the Trump administration was abruptly revoking the humanitarian parole they had been granted just months earlier.
An email arrived along with a letter from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security giving the family just three weeks to leave the country.
“You should depart the United States now,” the letter read, warning of “adverse immigration consequences” should they fail to comply.
What followed was a series of attorney visits and court decisions. They started with a nationwide injunction issued by a judge in Massachusetts that barred the administration from ending the program while legal challenges were resolved. The ruling came on April 14, just 10 days before the Rodríguezes — and nearly half a million other parolees — were supposed to self-deport. However, on May 30, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay, allowing the Trump administration to forcibly remove those without another legal way to stay in the country. The family has since joined a class-action lawsuit challenging the early termination of their parole status.
Desperate for protection and knowing the parole program wasn’t designed to be permanent, they applied for asylum in June.
Under the law, the Rodríguez family’s pending asylum case should prevent their deportation, though they will need to reapply for work authorization, which takes six months.
This provides Juan, Ana and Leticia with some comfort, but they have all seen the news reports of people being deported in error. It’s a frightening scenario they try not to think about.
And so the family waits, hoping for a positive outcome of their asylum case — which could take years. Or they could be sent back tomorrow, to Venezuela or to some other country where they have no connections at all.
It’s an incredibly stressful situation, but Juan said the family is choosing to remain optimistic and carry on living one day at a time. Avid baseball fans, they recently attended a Drillers game, grasping at normalcy wherever they can find it.
“What else can we do?” Juan asked. “For now, we are still together as a family, and we still have hope.”
William R. Wynn is the editor of La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma, and is a partner of the Tulsa Flyer.
