'Abused by Biden': DeSantis Sides With Trump on Ending Protections for Venezuelan Migrants

Gov. Ron DeSantis supports President Donald Trump's decision to eliminate protections guarding Venezuelans from deportation, the Florida Governor announced Wednesday.

While Trump has faced pushback from within for planning to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans, DeSantis told onlookers at a Miami press conference that the president "is getting the law right" by restricting how many non-citizens are in the country.

"TPS was abused by Biden...He did not have the authority to [grant TPS] under those circumstances," DeSantis said Wednesday. "I think President Trump is getting the law right. He's gonna get control over who is in this country.

"If you're a U.S. citizen and you come from another country and you're naturalized, you're every bit as American as anybody else. But just coming without process or without legality, that has got to end," DeSantis added.

TPS, however, is a legal status—at least temporarily. The federal government designates certain wartorn or disaster-struck countries for TPS and then allows some migrants from those countries to legally live and work within the United States for a period.

But on Wednesday, Trump announced that TPS would be revoked for more than 300,000 Venezuelans on April 2. Temporarily allowing these migrants to stay "is contrary to the national interest of the United States," reads the Department of Homeland Security memo.

And though Reps. Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz-Balart, and the Miami-Dade Commission have opposed the mass deportation of Venezuelans with TPS, asking instead for a case-by-case review, DeSantis remains in strong support of the president and is confident in his relationship with the Venezuelan community.

"I think they see a lot of things similar to how I do and President Trump does because they've seen leftist oppression up close," he said, referring to '90s dictator Hugo Chavez.

Under authoritarian Nicolas Maduro, scores of Venezuelans are fleeing the collapsing nation. This led Joe Biden to first classify Venezuela for TPS in 2023, and then extend TPS to over a million more immigrants—600,000 of which were Venezuelan—days before he left office.

DeSantis called it an incentive, alleging Biden was "giving TPS, saying, 'Come here!'"

The eighteen-month extension would have allowed beneficiaries to retain TPS through October 2026. Now, they face deportation in two months.