CNN Anchor Reveals Friends from South Florida Contacted Him, Worried About Deportations and Asking for Help

CNN anchor Boris Sanchez shared how friends from his hometown of Hialeah, Florida had reached out to him recently, seeking help connecting with state lawmakers who might help their loved ones avoid deportation in the wake of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Sanchez began the segment on Tuesday’s episode of CNN News Central by reporting on some of the recent deportation flights taking migrants back to Venezuela, and a recent article in The Washington Post about Venezuelans in Doral, a Miami suburb who supported President Donald Trump and are now worried he’ll deport them.

The Post article includes interviews with multiple local Doral residents about their feelings of “betrayal” about Trump’s immigration policies:

The decision to cancel temporary protected status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans has ignited fear, confusion and outrage in this Miami suburb, which is affectionately known as “Doralzuela.” Venezuelans here have been some of Trump’s biggest proponents. Even if many could not vote, they attended rallies, decorated their front lawns with Trump flags, and took to social media to support the man they thought would prioritize removing Nicolás Maduro from power.

For many Venezuelans, Trump’s decision feels like betrayal.

“The Venezuelan community gave President Trump their support,” said John De La Vega, a Venezuelan American immigration lawyer and Army veteran. “This is completely different of what I thought it was going to be.”

Sanchez brought on Sabrina Rodriguez, one of the Post reporters who worked on the article and his fellow Hialeah native, jokingly introducing her as the “Duchess of Hialeah.”

Rodriguez said a lot of people in the Venezuelan community in Doral had been “taken off guard.”

“There’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of outrage right now in Doral, Florida,” she continued, describing the community as having “supported Trump so vocally.”

“They didn’t think that when he was talking about immigration” and “the mass deportations, that he was talking about them,” she said. The people she interviewed thought Trump was talking about “this scary Venezuelan gang” Tren de Aragua and other criminal organizations, and “a lot of them were very supportive of that.”

“But now they’re seeing, oh, wait, we had legal status, we had, you know, work permits, a shield from deportation,” Rodriguez said. “We did it the — air quotes — right way by applying and doing background checks. And now he’s gone and revoked that. And where does that leave us?”

Sanchez and Rodriguez discussed how last fall’s presidential election and Trump’s immigration crackdown had “strained family relations,” since the people who had TPS status were not U.S. citizens and are now being affected by their relatives’ votes for the president.

“I can tell you that I’ve actually had friends reach out to me,” said Sanchez. “Supporters of Donald Trump from Hialeah, our hometown, who asked me to connect them with lawmakers in South Florida because in one instance, a young lady’s boyfriend has lost TPS, and now she’s concerned that he’s going to get deported.”

The anchor questioned if this “crisis” would flip back the politics of Miami-Dade County, where Trump had “made a lot of inroads with Hispanic voters” and flipped the county red for the first time in decades.

Watch the clip above via CNN.