Wilmer Escaray left Venezuela in 2007 and enrolled at Miami Dade College, opening his first restaurant six years later.
Today he has a dozen businesses that hire Venezuelan migrants like he once was, workers who are now terrified by what could be the end of their legal shield from deportation.
Since the start of February the Trump administration has ended two federal programs that together allowed more 700,000 Venezuelans to live and work legally in the U.S. along with hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
In the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, people dread what could face them if lawsuits that aim to stop the government fail. It’s all anyone discusses in “Little Venezuela” or “Doralzuela,” a city of 80,000 people surrounded by Miami sprawl, freeways and the Florida Everglades.
People who lose their protections would have to remain illegally at the risk of being deported or return home, an unlikely route given the political and economic turmoil in Venezuela.
“It’s really quite unfortunate to lose that human capital because there are people who do work here that other people won’t do,” Escaray, 37, said at one of his “Sabor Venezolano” restaurants.