This week was an ugly snapshot of America's ugly immigration dysfunction.

For starters, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem released a new "warning" video for undocumented migrants in the U.S.

"President Trump has a clear message for those who are in our country illegally," Noem says. "Leave now. If you don't, we will find you — and we will deport you.

"You will never return."

Noem's message was indeed clear: Although Trump says his sweeping crusade to arrest and deport undocumented migrants is focused on those convicted of crimes, the video more than suggests that millions of even law-abiding migrants face deportation.

What the video didn't say, however, is that the Trump Administration is effectively creating a whole new population of migrants it can deport by revoking their lawful, albeit ephemeral, immigration status and suddenly rendering their presence in the U.S. illegal.

Earlier this month, for example, Trump revoked an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS — which shields migrants fleeing dangerous violence or disaster in their home countries from deportation — for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. It made them deportable as of April back to a brutal dictatorship and economic collapse in their home country.

Then, on Thursday, the administration announced it is moving the expiration of TPS for half a million Haitians from February of 2026 (which the Biden Administration had set) back to August — when TPS for that group will end.

“We are returning integrity to the TPS system, which has been abused and exploited by illegal aliens for decades," the Homeland Security Department asserted in a statement.

That means Haitian TPS beneficiaries they will be deportable, too — in their case to a country taken over by violent and powerful gangs who the U.N. says committed 5,600 murders last year as well as countless ransom kidnappings, rapes and hijackings of food, fuel and medicine.

Which is a stark reminder of what has driven so many migrants to the U.S. and Florida in recent years under programs like TPS and humanitarian parole — the latter of which has kept Nicaraguans like Carlos free from their own country's brutal dictatorship.

Carlos, who asked WLRN not to use his last name to protect his identity, owned a pharmacy back in Managua — until massive street protests against Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega erupted in 2018. Ortega's security forces eventually put down the demonstrations, killing hundreds of people in the process.

In the aftermath, Ortega demanded loyalty of anyone who ran a business in Nicaragua — including Carlos, who opposed Ortega’s regime. Carlos says his license application renewals were denied, and his business shut down.

“They make sure the economic aggression and harassment ruin you and your family,” Carlos told WLRN.

Carlos then heard of the Biden Administration’s humanitarian parole for migrants fleeing dictatorships and violence in Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. He signed up, and two years ago he and his wife and two young children arrived in Palm Beach, where, with his parole work permit, Carlos has a job in a factory.

“We’ve done everything the right way here,” Carlos said. “Paying our taxes, respecting the law.”

But the non-renewable parole was only for two years, and Trump has since canceled Biden's program.

Carlos is now trying to adjust his immigration status to something more permanent, like political asylum. But Trump has suspended, if not all but canceled, asylum as well.

Meanwhile, Carlos says his family’s case is urgent because Ortega isn’t likely to take emigrants like them back if they’re deported to Nicaragua — or if he does, they risk ending up in prison.

“We’d either be without a nation to take us in or facing jail as ‘traitors to the homeland,’ which is what Ortega calls us,” said Carlos — who added that the phasing out of his family's parole now makes them anxious about going out in public, where federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents might detain them.

That fear is especially high now after the New York Times this week reported that the U.S. is shipping deported migrants whose home countries won’t accept them to remote camps in third countries like Panama (or to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba).

“Most Nicaraguans, if not all of them, cannot return because there’s no rule of law," said Claudio Acevedo, a Nicaraguan human rights activist in Miami.

"That is enough argument for political asylum to be granted. However, now they’re left in this uncertainty and the unknown.”

In the case of Venezuelans, Trump last month struck a deal with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to have his regime accept deportees again. That makes the expulsion of Venezuelans here who lose their TPS all the more likely — and all the more reason to fight Trump's Venezuelan TPS elimination, says expat leaders like Adelys Ferro, of Weston, executive director of the nonprofit Venezuelan-American Caucus.

The Trump Administration argues conditions have improved enough in Venezuela for the TPS holders to return. But Ferro, and most Venezuela experts, insist deportees still face persecution if not prison — not to mention the worst humanitarian crisis modern South American history — if they’re sent back home.

“You have had even the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, saying that Venezuela is a threat for humanity," Ferro told WLRN's South Florida Roundup program. "And that’s why we’ll see the Trump Administration in court.”

The first lawsuit challenging Trump's Venezuelan TPS rollback was filed this week in San Francisco by the nonprofit National TPS Alliance, along with several Venezuelan TPS recipients, including Floridians.

It argues Noem had no reasonable grounds to cut the TPS benefit — and criticizes what it calls her and the Trump Administration's "racist" labeling of all Venezuelan migrants as criminals because a small number of them had ties to a violent Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua.

The suit also includes a declaration from Ferro, who points out the economic harm that could come to thriving U.S. cities like Doral, Florida — the country's largest Venezuelan enclave — because so many TPS holders are, for example, "small business owners unsure whether to sell their businesses or close their doors" now.

Trump's Haitian TPS rollback is just as controversial — especially given the brazen lie he told on the campaign trail last year that Haitian migrants in Ohio were killing and eating residents' pets. And it will just as likely draw lawsuits given the horrific, failed-state security and economic conditions Haitian migrants would be going back to if deported.

Gepsie Metellus, who heads the nonprofit Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center in North Miami, told WLRN: "It's very disheartening that the current state of gang control and violence in Haiti is not compelling enough for the Trump Administration to allow Haitian TPS holders the opportunity to continue to legally live and work in the US until the situation is stabilized.

"I hope they will reconsider."

In a statement, U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami Gardens, said returning Haitians in the U.S. to Haiti “is a kiss of death” and “not just wrong — it’s inhumane.”

Experts say all this chaos reflects not just Trump's anti-immigration fever, but also a key flaw in the U.S.’s broken immigration system that he's been allowed to exploit: an overreliance on temporary, stop-gap measures like TPS and humanitarian parole to make up for Congress’ refusal to update legal immigration pathways.

“If you tell people there’s no way to come legally, the message is sent that the way to come is illegally," David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington D.C., told WLRN.

Bier argues the scarcity of functional legal options for the migrant workers the U.S. needs, and the migrant refugees who need the U.S., is what has led to so much of the illegal immigration — so much of what Trump calls the "invasion" of the U.S. southern border in recent years.

Bier says that dysfunctional dynamic was especially true during Trump’s first presidency — and he doesn’t believe Trump’s deportation crusade will make much difference now.

In his populist drive to demonize immigrants, “Trump slashed legal immigration — asylum was down about 90% — and there was more illegal immigration as a result," Bier said.

"Asylum, meanwhile, has too often become a substitute for other forms of legal entry, and it wasn’t designed for that purpose.

"We should focus instead," he stressed, on fixing the legal immigration system in general.”

That should include, Bier adds, "things like an improved worker visa system — year-round visas for jobs that don't require college degrees" but which much of the U.S. economy needs migrant workers to fill.

"This is a failure of Congress to create an immigration system that's workable for the 21st century," Bier said.

Bier and others WLRN spoke to said Miami Republican U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar is one of the few on Capitol Hill working to fix it. One of her bills, the Dignity Act, offers undocumented migrants legal residency via a set of conditions.

“No has done more to think about this subject deeply, that I’ve seen in Congress in almost a decade, than Representative Salazar," said Bier — who is echoed by South Florida immigrant advocates like Acevedo.

But the big problem, Bier acknowledges, is that Salazar's bill, which she introduced three years ago this month, remains stalled in Congress.

So does another piece of legislation Salazar co-sponsors, the Venezuelan Adjustment Act, which would put Venezuelan migrants on a more direct path to legal residency. Salazar and three other congressional members from Florida — U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Weston, and U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami Gardens, U.S. Rep. Darren Soto of Orlando — introduced the bill two years ago.

But, like the Dignity Act, it too has stalled on Capitol Hill.

This week Salazar, Wasserman-Schultz, Wilson and Soto re-introduced it .

Meanwhile, TPS for thousands of Nicaraguans is up for renewal next month. Few Nicaraguan community leaders WLRN spoke with expect that renewal to happen.