Kimiko Jackson works 10-hour shifts as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lakewood, comes home to a 10-year-old daughter and a 5-month-old son, and visits her partner in immigration detention almost every day. Darvi Rivas, a 35-year-old Venezuelan national, was arrested by ICE officers on Interstate 5 near Lacey on July 3 after losing the Temporary Protected Status that had shielded him from deportation for years.
Rivas is one of nearly 1 million Venezuelan nationals who have lost TPS, according to The News Tribune. He lost that protection in November, the paper reported, and was picked up during what the Department of Homeland Security described as a targeted operation. DHS has said Rivas will receive due process and will remain in ICE custody pending removal.
Jackson, 46, told the paper that Rivas worked, paid taxes and had no criminal record. She hired a lawyer for him, and that attorney has requested a bond hearing, now scheduled for Tuesday, August 25. Rivas has told the paper that reactivating his TPS would be a huge help, and that he passes the time in detention at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma drawing pictures of his family, saying the drawing relaxes him.
A Family Built, Then Upended
Rivas arrived in the United States on September 9, 2022, and was encountered by Customs and Border Protection the next day in El Paso, Texas. The Biden administration released him after that encounter, and he filed an asylum case that year. That case was dismissed in 2024 because he qualified for TPS instead, per the paper's reporting. He went on to work full-time delivering for DoorDash and Amazon Flex, while Jackson, a single mother of two now that Rivas is detained, had returned to work at the VA after maternity leave shortly before his arrest.
Jackson also sees a concussion specialist for brain fog caused by a car accident and visits a chiropractor every week, obligations she now juggles largely on her own. Speaking to the paper from Tacoma, Jackson said simply that she and Rivas are doing this now — pressing forward through the bond process rather than accepting that their family is over.
How Venezuela's TPS Ended
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled TPS for Venezuela in February 2025, citing improvements to the country as the reason in the Federal Register. Venezuela continues to face political and social unrest, according to the paper's reporting, and two earthquakes caused 6,100 deaths and injured tens of thousands there in June 2026. The Trump administration has revoked TPS for multiple countries during the president's second term, and DHS has ended TPS programs for 13 of the 17 countries designated at the start of the term.
Temporary Protected Status was created by Congress in 1990 as a humanitarian designation letting nationals of countries facing famine, natural disaster or civil war remain in the U.S. It protected nationals from almost 30 countries at its height, and Venezuelan nationals first became eligible in 2021. Attorney Katherine Currie said, in an email cited by the paper, that TPS had functioned as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress not intending it to be permanent — though she also noted that temporary protected status is, by design, temporary.
The Supreme Court has allowed deportations of Venezuelan nationals to continue while litigation over the terminations remains pending, though it has not issued a final ruling on Venezuela specifically. The justices have separately upheld the decision to end TPS for Syrian and Haitian nationals, and the Trump administration shuttered those countries' TPS programs within the past month. Federal judges cleared the way to eliminate TPS protections for Ethiopian nationals on August 18. Matt Adams said the Supreme Court decisions affirmed the administration's authority to take the TPS actions, and separately told the paper that political unrest and earthquakes represent exactly the type of humanitarian crisis TPS was created for. Adams estimated hundreds of Pierce County residents were affected by the TPS changes.
Enforcement Surges Across the Pacific Northwest
Rivas's arrest fits a broader enforcement pattern documented by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, which found ICE arrests across Washington, Oregon and Alaska surged from fewer than 250 in late 2024 to nearly 2,250 in the final three months of 2025 — approaching enforcement levels last seen during the Obama administration. That research, built from federal Form I-213 records obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, also documented 64 verified instances between August 2025 and July 2026 in which federal agents made arrests after querying driver and vehicle license records from the Washington Department of Licensing through the Nlets data-sharing system, even though state sanctuary laws restrict local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Nationally, removal orders for Venezuelan nationals climbed 39% from March to June 2026, with 10,939 such orders issued in June alone. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reported that immigration courts nationwide delivered around 79,000 removal orders that same month, part of an all-time record of 100,773 case completions — 78.3% of which ended in removal orders. TRAC data also shows the active immigration court backlog has swelled to more than 3.1 million cases, with over 2.3 million pending asylum applications, while only 1.76% of new deportation filings in fiscal year 2026 involved allegations beyond unlawful entry itself.
A separate federal judge barred non-custodial ICE arrest practices in Oregon on February 4. In Tacoma, the Northwest ICE Processing Center — the 1,575-bed facility run by The GEO Group where Rivas is held — has faced such severe capacity pressure that federal authorities temporarily transferred 41 detainees to Alaska facilities in June, a strain Hoodline previously reported has fueled a Washington state lawsuit over inspection access at the facility. Tacoma's city council separately voted to bar ICE from using municipal property.
Limited Paths Forward, Widespread Fear
People with a U.S. citizen spouse or a child 21 or older can apply for a family visa allowing permanent residency, one of the few individual paths available to former TPS holders like Rivas. DHS also allows undocumented people to register for voluntary self-deportation through the CBP Home mobile app, which includes a $2,600 exit bonus, a free plane ticket and forgiveness of failure-to-depart fines. Rivas hopes instead to return to his family after leaving detention.
Yadira Morales, speaking to the paper from Tacoma, said the Latino community is scared. That fear is echoed across the region: a University of Washington Center for Human Rights study found Temporary Protected Status does not itself confer independent legal status, meaning work permits and deportation shields for former holders vanish automatically once a designation ends, regardless of pending asylum claims. For Jackson and Rivas, that legal reality now hinges on a bond hearing set for Tuesday — and on whether a family built over four years in Washington state can stay together.
-4.webp?w=160&h=400&fit=crop&crop=edges)
