“V” works six days a week, between 10 and 17 hours a day, at two restaurants in Madison. She doesn’t complain. She’s happy.
In the U.S., V, a 22-year-old who requested anonymity to avoid legal attention, has felt safe and at peace. She can send money home to her parents. Compared to living in Caracas, Venezuela, her future in Wisconsin has offered so many more opportunities.
She moved to Madison in 2023 thanks to a Biden-era sponsorship program for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Her sponsor, a La Crosse grandmother named Sandra McAnany, brought 17 people to the U.S. McAnany proudly notes all of them are working and paying taxes.
Last month, the Trump administration ended the program for new applicants. Then, it targeted people who already arrived in the U.S. through the sponsorship program.
The program provides individuals the opportunity to work and live legally for two years before they need to switch to another legal status that would allow them to live here longer, perhaps permanently. But the administration paused the processing of applications for other immigration statuses. Meanwhile, the two-year clock is ticking.
The moves have left those migrants who are here fearful, and their American sponsors frustrated. They see the CHNV program — an acronym for the four Latin American countries that qualify — as an effective and beneficial immigration pathway. It provided migrants an incentive to arrive legally instead of crossing the southern U.S. border without authorization, as well as giving them a support network when they arrived, McAnany said.
The migrants “went through the background checks, and they waited where they were. They didn’t rush the border,” McAnany said. “They followed all of the rules. But now the rules are changing.”
Those roughly 530,000 migrants now don’t know if they’ll be able to stay once their initial two-year period runs out — for many, in a matter of months — and whether their pending immigration cases for other statuses such as asylum will ever be decided.
Most pressing, though, are reports that the Trump administration is planning to revoke the legal status of those people before the two years are up if they haven’t yet applied for, or obtained, another immigration status.
The CHNV program used an authority called parole to admit people into the U.S. The Trump administration argues Biden used his parole authority too expansively.
The administration has “closed the doors on a lot of people,” V said in Spanish.
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As her family faced insecurity and economic difficulties in Venezuela, she thought about crossing the border at times too. But, she said, “I didn’t want to do things wrong. I wanted to do it legally.” The sponsorship program, she said, presented a “big opportunity.”
Facing her own two-year endpoint, if she doesn’t receive another legal status, such as asylum, later this year, V, like thousands of others, would lose her work permit and protection from deportation. If she were forced to return to Venezuela, her family would be at risk, and she’d lose the stability she’s worked to build in Madison, she said.
“I’d lose a part of my heart and my home,” she said. “It would be a step backward for me and for my family.”
Nicaraguan family’s move to Wisconsin saved their sick toddler
One Nicaraguan family, now in Richland Center, believes their severely ill child is alive today because they could fly to the U.S. through the sponsorship program and admit him to American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison.
Retired math teacher and carpenter Bill Bewick of Richland Center had already sponsored a Ukrainian family of five in 2022. And in 2023, he wanted to do it again. Having read about the dangerous journey migrants take through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, Bewick sought to sponsor a Venezuelan family.
The Ramirez family from Nicaragua believes their severely ill baby survived because he got medical treatment in Madison. Parents Hellen and Ervin are pictured with children Abigail and Elias.
Ultimately, the Ramirez family from Nicaragua was the only one who applied to be sponsored by Bewick through a matching organization called Welcome.US. Bewick was struck that the father, Ervin Ramirez, had studied math in Taiwan. In addition to Spanish, he spoke English and Chinese and was a manager in a textile factory.
In early 2024, just a couple months after Bewick agreed to sponsor the family, 1-year-old Elias Ramirez developed a fever, and it didn’t go away. His health quickly deteriorated. At a hospital in the capital city, Managua, doctors diagnosed him with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a rare, life-threatening disease in which white blood cells attack other cells.
With Elias hospitalized, the family missed their scheduled flight to the U.S. The Managua doctors sent Elias home with some medicine, but his condition worsened in the following months. Then the family ran out of medicine. Finally, the Ramirezes secured a flight to the U.S. on Memorial Day weekend.
Elias spent the next month at the Madison children’s hospital, and his parents stayed at the nearby Ronald McDonald House. When the toddler was released, the family moved into Bewick’s home with instructions on how to give Elias injections of medicine twice a day.
“If you would’ve seen Elias at the end of June, he looked like the most forlorn, sick little boy that you would ever see,” Bewick said.
Since then, the treatment has transformed him into a typical toddler. He’s not out of the woods. He has regular check-ins at the hospital, and the family has applied for asylum in hopes it can stay in the U.S. and continue to receive essential medical care.
At a late-February immigration appointment in Milwaukee, it hoped for progress on their asylum case. But likely because of the pause on processing applications, officials only took their fingerprints.
Ukrainians also affected by Trump administration changes
The pause on processing applications also applies to Ukrainians who arrived through a private sponsorship program called Uniting for Ukraine — about 240,000 Ukrainians used that pathway — and a program for certain Colombians, Ecuadorians and others with American relatives.
The Ukrainian family of five that Bewick first sponsored arrived through Uniting for Ukraine. The family has received Temporary Protected Status, and the children are finding their stride in school, Bewick said. Standing in as the only grandfather in the children’s lives, he recently attended their elementary school’s Grandparents’ Day.
“It would be a crying shame to send either one of these families packing,” Bewick said. ” America is better off to have them here.”
Bill Bewick, a retired math teacher and carpenter from Richland Center, holds 1-year-old Elias Ramirez, a child who came to the U.S. with his family thanks to Bewick’s sponsorship.
Over his time as a sponsor, Bewick has been driven by his deep Christian faith and a connection to the Good Samaritan story. The new immigration policies from the Trump administration come from a “spirit of cruelty,” in his view.
“A lot of people tell me, ‘I’m fine with immigrants coming as long as they come the right way,'” Bewick said. “There is now no ‘right way.’ And even the people that came the right away are in (danger) of being sent back.”
Migrants paroled into U.S. now have few options to stay
Before the pause, advocates had been urging those who arrived on parole to apply immediately for another way to stay. But their options have dwindled quickly. Migrants and their sponsors are searching for alternatives.
A common option, Temporary Protected Status, provides work permits but not a pathway to citizenship to residents of certain countries with dangerous conditions. But the Trump administration has effectively cut off that pathway for Venezuelans and Haitians. Nicaraguans were never eligible for TPS.
Asylum may be another option for migrants who entered the U.S. on parole. The asylum system is heavily backlogged. To be granted asylum, applicants must prove they suffered persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, social group or political affiliation, or that they have a “well-founded fear” of persecution if they were to return home.
That could be a tall order for some who came to the U.S. through the CHNV program. The application did not require people to demonstrate that they’d meet those stringent standards of persecution.
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La Crosse sponsor who helped settle families in U.S. reflects on their uncertain future
McAnany, the La Crosse woman who sponsored 17 people, is doing her best to navigate those dizzying legal developments.
She never expected to sponsor so many people. But at the start of 2023, she read an article about an American doctor who sponsored 47 people, and she thought of her Venezuelan daughter-in-law, and her time volunteering in Colombia with Venezuelans fleeing political repression and economic collapse.
She left a comment on the doctor’s Facebook page. Then people seeking American sponsors saw her comment and began messaging her and telling their stories.
In the end, she sponsored 10 adults and 7 children. Two are from Nicaragua and 15 are from Venezuela. She mostly took in people who had other relatives or close friends in the U.S. already, so they settled across the country, from Maryland to Georgia to Colorado. She hosted a father and son at her home for more than a year.
McAnany signed them up for English classes and helped them with resumes and school enrollment questions. They bought their own airline tickets to the U.S. and all arrived between September and December 2023.
She traveled to visit each of them at their new homes. She’s planning a second round of trips, and she’s in a WhatsApp group chat with everyone to keep up with their lives. She noted none of them receives government benefits such as food stamps or housing assistance. And recently she tallied how much they’ve paid into Medicaid and Social Security — about $20,000 in all.
“Everybody is doing everything possible to be an asset and to not take away from the United States,” she said.
The CNHV program was a glimpse at what immigration should be, McAnany said. People sought out a legal route, were vetted ahead of time and stayed in their countries until they were approved.
“They take being in the United States really seriously,” McAnany said.
Being a sponsor to the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan families is one of the most rewarding things she’s done in her life, she said. It’s everyone’s responsibility to help those around them, she believes.
Since Trump took office and started issuing executive orders and policy directives on immigration, McAnany has had trouble sleeping. She thinks about all the families she’s gotten to know, and the uncertain futures they’re now facing.
She’s been turning to prayer.
“I can’t control the decisions that are made,” she said. “All I can do is my best each day, to be there in whatever way I can.”
Sophie Carson is a general assignment reporter who reports on religion and faith, immigrants and refugees and more. Contact her at scarson@gannett.com or 920-323-5758.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Immigrants with Wisconsin sponsors at risk after Trump policy changes
