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Venezuelan Leader Calls Marco Rubio’s Failures On Immigration “A Slap In The Face To My Community”
Venezuelans are continuing to call out Marco Rubio for being too weak to stand up for their community. With tens of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in Florida living with Temporary Protected Status, leaders are imploring Rubio to support a path to permanent residency, yet Rubio has refused to support them.
In a new op-ed, Pastor José De Jesús Palmar Morales, a Venezuelan TPS recipient, slams Rubio’s ineffectiveness on immigration issues as “heartbreaking” and calls his insistence that Venezuelan immigrants return to Venezuela “a slap in the face to my community.”
Read key excerpts from the op-ed below:
Orlando Sentinel: Op-ed: We’re living in limbo. Senators, help Venezuelans with path to citizenship
By Father José De Jesús Palmar Morales
Key Points:
- I never thought I would leave Venezuela in the 30 years I served as a Catholic priest there before 2017, when I started receiving death threats for my vocal opposition to the corrupt, tyrannical, socialist President Nicolas Maduro.
- I am just one of a diaspora of 60,000 Venezuelans living with TPS in Florida today, all of us fleeing tyranny in the only country we had ever known. There is no going back. Through sheer force, Maduro still holds power in Venezuela today.
- While my status allows me a work permit, I am also forced to live my senior years in an unrelenting state of anxiety, never knowing if or when I could be forced to flee what has become another homeland for me.
- Our senators know about mine and my compatriots’ struggles — and contributions — all too well. Sen. Rubio is, after all, the son of Cuban immigrants. He knows first-hand the grit and determination it takes to leave your homeland and make it in America.
- So, it’s heartbreaking to watch both Florida’s senators sit on the sidelines, refusing to help shape bipartisan immigration solutions and thereby playing politics with our lives.
- A recent poll by the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC) found that not even Trump voters support deportation — only 17 percent are in favor — yet that is the fate TPS holders face unless senators, including Rubio and Scott, pass a pathway to citizenship. They should know that Florida’s Venezuelans are paying attention.
- Rubio responded to news about the public poll by professing his hope that we Venezuelans will one day return home, a slap in the face to my community which has already established deep roots here. As my friend William Diaz asked him, when Cuba’s regime is gone, will he go back to Cuba to be a governor of a province there?
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