'IF HE GETS RID OF MADURO, WE'LL FORGIVE HIM'

Venezuelan exiles in a Miami suburb are backing Trump's efforts to remove the leader from power

- BY JESUS MESA IN MIAMI, FLORIDA

In Doral, a suburb west of Miami where nearly 40 percent of residents trace their roots to Venezuela, a bust of Simón Bolívar sits mostly unnoticed beside a strip mall parking lot, one block from the popular café El Arepazo. Bolívar, the 19th-century independence hero, has long been claimed by Venezuela’s socialist regime as the ideological father of its “Bolivarian Revolution.” But in Doral—often dubbed “Doralzuela”—exiles have tried to reclaim him as their own.

More than 770,000 Venezuelan-born residents now live in the U.S. according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute. About half of them reside in Florida, including roughly 174,000 in the Miami area. But Doral has become a kind of exile capital, where politics spill over into everyday life.

Inside El Arepazo, the energy has shifted. The tables where exiles once argued over elections and strategies for change now feel subdued. Near the entrance hangs a poster of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. No one brings her up. Conversations have turned elsewhere.

Staff glance up when unfamiliar faces enter. “People just don’t talk anymore,” one employee told Newsweek. “They look around before answering even small questions.” Some regulars have stopped coming altogether. Many fear that speaking openly about Venezuela could endanger relatives or jeopardize their immigration cases, especially after President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS—a program that lets eligible migrants live and work legally in the U.S.—and humanitarian parole.