In normal times, the US military decapitating a regime would be the biggest foreign policy story of the year (at least), but the extraordinary scenes that saw Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro seized and imprisoned have been quickly eclipsed by the chaos in the Middle East.
But for Venezuelans, the economic and migratory crisis that contributed to US intervention is still unfolding - and it has important ramifications for the lives of ordinary people, which are being turned inside-out.
As a researcher at the University of Oxford studying Venezuelan migration, I want to share the human stories behind those forgotten headlines, including the impacts for Venezuelans who were pursuing education in the US.
Miranda is seventeen and finishing her final year of school in Miami with a 3.8 GPA. Her family had even paid into Florida’s college savings plan. When their legal status was revoked, that path closed. Miranda went through a period of shock and rage before accepting that she would have to leave the country. At school, she does not talk about any of this. She suspects other Venezuelan families around her are in the same situation, but nobody speaks about it because they fear deportation and social stigma. Miranda has been accepted to a university in Berlin. She plans to move if she receives enough financial aid to make it possible.
Miranda is one of roughly 600,000 Venezuelans who held Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the US, granted in 2021 by the Biden administration in response to the crisis that had forced millions to leave Venezuela. In 2025, the Trump administration implemented a policy that revoked this legal status, arguing that conditions in Venezuela no longer warranted protection, and stripping them of their legal permission to remain, work, and access education.
Many were studying or planning to study when the revocation hit.
Emilia was three years into a physics PhD at a top New York university when her legal status was revoked. She had left Venezuela as a teenager, when blackouts and shortages made daily life impossible, and her mother, one of the many doctors who left as the country's healthcare system collapsed, went from practising medicine to doing manual labour in Houston for below minimum wage. Emilia's academic record earned her a scholarship at a top British university. She is now restarting her doctorate from the beginning and has had to sell many of her possessions to make the move. Most of Emilia’s family in the US are citizens and long-time Republican voters. They still support Trump. Emilia told me she feels deep frustration because they were partly responsible for her situation. Her family considers her case an exception, a necessary casualty of a policy they still believe in. She has decided not to speak about it to avoid damaging the relationship.
Alexander is twenty-six. He grew up in a small rural town in Venezuela, crossed the Darién Gap, and reached New York. He began learning English and looking into nursing programmes. When TPS was revoked, he put his educational plans on hold. He fears he could be deported at any moment. Long-term plans like education are off the table. Instead, he works as cleaning staff at a hardware store in the Bronx and lives in a house with five other Venezuelans in the same situation. They pool their resources and save what they can in case they are forced to leave the US. He told me that if he had been able to study, his English would be much better by now, and better English could mean a different job – more opportunity. He feels he is wasting his time, stuck in the present. For him, education would allow him to build a future in New York. But none of that is possible while his legal status remains uncertain.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, 48% of Venezuelan adults in the US hold a bachelor's degree or higher, well above the US-born and overall immigrant populations. When legal stability is withdrawn, education is one of the first things to go. Families are separated and futures are forcefully interrupted. The stigma of losing legal status and the fear of being identified and deported produce a silence that hides what is happening to Venezuelan students in the US. Behind that silence, people are making irreversible decisions about their futures with no institutional support and no public attention. By the time the next statistics are published, the damage will already be done.
