WASHINGTON — Maria Eugenia Torres Ramirez never sought to reside in the United States illegally. A political activist from Venezuela who fiercely opposes President Nicolas Maduro, she approached border agents in Del Rio, Texas, in 2021 and asked for asylum, saying she feared for her life.

Torres Ramirez, 37, fled Venezuela with her two young children after federal police fired shots outside her restaurant and began demanding that employees tell them where they could find her.

With her asylum case pending, Torres Ramirez, who now lives in Los Angeles, bolstered her legal armor by obtaining Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows people facing extraordinary conditions in their homelands to reside in the U.S. If denied asylum, she reasoned, she would still have a work permit and be shielded from deportation.

That was until the Trump administration moved to end TPS for many Venezuelans.

"It has generated a lot of fear," she said. "If they deny the asylum, I'd have even more uncertainty. The moment he gets rid of the legal protections, we are illegal."

Central to President Trump's campaign for reelection was getting tough on illegal immigration. But Trump also cut down pathways for legal immigration that offered a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of people who fled war and other political or humanitarian crises.

The Trump administration shut down a phone application used by migrants to legally enter the U.S. at the southern border. Refugee admissions have been suspended. Humanitarian programs that allowed Afghans, Ukrainians, Venezuelans and others to fly to the U.S. have been halted. Broad use of TPS, which applies to people from 17 countries, is anticipated to stop once current designations expire.

During his first presidency, Trump moved to end TPS for 95% of the people who had it, including those from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal and Honduras. Those terminations were stalled in court, and when President Biden took office he reversed course and expanded protections to include people from additional countries, such as Venezuela, Ukraine, Ethiopia and Burma. Biden extended most of those protections for another 18 months — the maximum allowed under law — just before leaving office.

The administration already rescinded Biden's extension and ended TPS for 350,000 Venezuelans, like Torres Ramirez, who arrived in 2023 or earlier. Their protections end April 7. Another 250,000 Venezuelans remain protected until September.

Trump ordered a review of all TPS designations, and legal experts say the same justifications for the Venezuela termination could be applied to any other benefiting country.

Republicans including Trump saw Biden's immigration programs as a government-sanctioned way to facilitate illegal immigration.

"They just created several different buckets and called them legal pathways, which they're not," Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan said on Fox News the night after the inauguration. "There's the same population of illegal aliens coming across the border."

The Biden administration oversaw an unprecedented expansion of temporary immigration protections. After illegal border crossings reached historic highs in 2023, the administration utilized those discretionary programs in hopes of dissuading migrants from further overwhelming the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump directed officials to stop allowing migrants into the U.S. through a process called parole, which is used for humanitarian or public interest purposes. Democratic and Republican administrations have used the authority for decades, including for 30,000 Hungarians after the uprising of 1956 against the Soviets, and more than 330,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians between 1975 and 1980 due to the Vietnam War.

Trump's first-day executive order, "Protecting the American people against invasion," directs his administration to ensure that parole "is exercised on only a case-by-case basis."

Minutes after Trump was sworn in, his administration shut down CBP One, a mobile app under which migrants in Mexico could request an appointment with border authorities at official ports of entry. Since January 2023, nearly 1 million people entered the country with two-year work permits through the app.

Many of those who arrived through CBP One and other humanitarian avenues went on to apply for asylum. Migrants have up to one year to submit an application. But those who have yet to apply could become targets for deportation.

Immigration agents are now authorized to revoke the parole status and quickly remove anyone who has been in the U.S. for less than two years, according to a Jan. 23 memo signed by Caleb Vitello, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The fast-tracked deportations sidestep immigration court proceedings, which can take years due to a stiff backlog.

Trump halted programs that permitted U.S. citizens to financially sponsor people from Ukraine, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti; the migrants could purchase commercial flights to the U.S. and work legally for two years. Some 240,000 Ukrainians, plus more than 530,000 from the other four countries, arrived under those processes.

Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said the motivation to restrict immigration isn't just "about fixing the so-called broken immigration system. For them, it's the fear of a non-white majority."

Trump's orders also affect 76,000 Afghans who were evacuated after the fall of Kabul in 2021. Although many have received asylum, some could lose their legal status with officials no longer renewing parole protections.

"These parole programs function very much like a visa," said Kendra Blandon, an attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights in Washington. "They are people who applied for entry into the United States before they arrived, they went through the paperwork process. When you apply for a tourist visa you have to prove you have the money to be a tourist. The people in this parole program proved they have their own money and U.S. citizen sponsors."

Citing "the burden of new arrivals," Trump indefinitely paused the U.S. refugee admissions program, stranding thousands of refugees approved for departure after showing they were fleeing persecution based on their political beliefs, religion, gender or other factors. The vetting process can take about two years and involves multiple interviews, as well as security and health screenings.

Last fiscal year, the U.S. resettled more than 100,000 refugees — the highest number in three decades.

The administration also instructed resettlement agencies to stop using federal funds on services, such as job placement and medical assistance, for refugees who are already in the U.S.

Dalya Hussein, who works with Fresno Immigrant and Refugee Ministries, helps refugees during their first three months in the U.S. She and her colleagues greet newcomers at the airport, shuttle them to a rented and furnished home, and help them apply for county benefits and get required vaccinations for school.

FIRM had welcomed about 150 people in December and nearly the same number in January, Hussein said, most from Afghanistan and Syria.

But since Trump suspended the refugee program, that work has screeched to a halt. Families approved for resettlement in Fresno had to cancel their flights. Refugees who had recently arrived in the Central Valley suddenly found themselves without FIRM's support.

"We couldn't serve them anymore," Hussein said.

The population of immigrants without legal status reached a new high of 13.7 million in mid-2023, according to estimates released this month by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Immigration advocates say ending TPS and other legal avenues toward residency could have an unintended effect on that number.

For example, if someone loses TPS protection but won't or can't leave the country, they will increase the ranks of the undocumented population.

____

Times staff writers Rebecca Plevin and Rachel Uranga in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

____

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.