FILE - Severe shortages and one of the world’s highest inflation rates have helped drive nearly 8 million Venezuelans from the petrostate of 28 million people, including Venezuelan migrant Lisbeth Contreras, who hugs her children as she crosses the Suchiate River on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, on Oct. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix, File)

MIAMI (AP) — Cuba’s at one of its lowest points since the 1959 revolution, with nationwide scarcity fueling massive emigration, occasional protests and government crackdowns. Gangs control the streets of Haiti’s capital, firing on arriving jets and forcing delays in elections to replace slain President Jovenel Moïse.

Nicaragua’s president has imprisoned protesters, opposition members and Catholic leaders. Severe shortages and one of the world’s highest inflation rates have helped drive nearly 8 million Venezuelans from the petrostate of 28 million people.

Half a million Cubans, Haitian, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans were welcomed by President Joe Biden using a legal tool known as humanitarian parole, granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump appears certain to dismantle this legal tool, saying during his campaign that he would end the “outrageous abuse of parole.”

Trump made anti-immigration rhetoric a key part of his campaign, warning that he would kick out hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the country under Biden programs.

“Get ready to leave because you’re going to be going out real fast,” Trump said.

A giant group of people with tenuous legal status formed under Biden and many now expect their protections to vanish with a stroke of a pen. Those protections include Biden’s parole efforts; his support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program; parole for people who entered the country on a border appointment app called CBP One and his expanded use of a law to shield people from deportation — known as Temporary Protected Status.

What’s the purpose of parole?

The U.S. has a thicket of complicated immigration laws that drive many to enter the country illegally but parole allows the president to admit people “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

Since 1952 it has been ordered 126 times by every president, except for Trump, according to the pro-immigration Cato Institute.

The Trump administration could revoke parole for everyone who has it, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Going back is not an option

“All immigrants are fearful,” said Manuel Castaño, a 39-year-old human rights activist from Nicaragua whose parole expires in March 2025 and has requested asylum, a process that can take years.

Castaño, who works in building maintenance in South Florida, applied for parole in February 2023 after his uncle sponsored him, a requirement under the law. Less than a month later, he arrived at Miami with his wife and their 13-year-old daughter.

He said he was threatened in his country and feared for his and his family in their homeland.

“Going back to Nicaragua is not an option,” he said.

A focus on Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans

More than a million people have been granted parole under Biden, including tens of thousands of Afghans and Ukrainians.

Biden introduced parole for Venezuelans in October 2022 and expanded it in early 2023 to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. These countries refuse to take back most citizens deported from the U.S.

Under an aspect of parole known as CHNV, up to 30,000 people from the four countries are accepted monthly. They can obtain work authorization for two years and apply online. The goal of the tool is dissuading migrants from crossing the border illegally.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 110,240 Cubans, 211,010 Haitians, 93,070 Nicaraguans, and 117,310 Venezuelans were granted parole through the end of October.

The team reshaping the policies under Trump is expected to include former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan, as “border czar;” immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy; and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as head of the Department of Homeland Security. All have been outspoken opponents of Biden’s immigration policies.

Kyle Varner, a 39-year-old doctor and real-estate investor from Spokane, Washington, says he has spent $150,000 on plane tickets, housing and other costs for 47 Venezuelans he’s sponsored over the last two years. Now he is desperately saving as much money as possible to pay immigration attorneys that could figure out a way for the Venezuelans to stay after Trump takes office.

“I am very alarmed,” Varner said.

Legal challenges are certain

Mass termination of migrants’ two-year parole terms would be subject to legal challenge but the Trump administration could simply halt new admissions and just wait until beneficiaries’ status expired, Reichlin-Melnick said.

Another possibility, said Charles Kuck, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, is that the Trump administration could find a relatively easy way to deport people granted parole because there are official records of them and their sponsors.

“Those are the easiest people to be in rounding up because the government knows where they live,” said Kuck.

Leaving the U.S. before you’re expelled

That is why Venezuelan Ireswa Lopez is already thinking of leaving the U.S. when her parole expires in March 2025.

Lopez, 48, was having a hard time working at a family butcher shop in Venezuela, where food is scarce and water often contaminated. She learned that there was a program to come to the United States legally, and with a cousin’s sponsorship she flew to Miami in January 2023.

Although she has found a job at an Atlanta children’s day care, she says, “I am leaving.”

“Staying illegally is not in my plans,” she said.