In Doral, a Republican who voted for President Donald Trump is now publicly breaking with the administration over how its immigration crackdown is being carried out. City Councilman Rafael Pineyro, the only Venezuelan-American on Doral’s council, says he still supports deporting people convicted of crimes but has come to see the detention of working families and asylum seekers with pending cases as a line the government should not cross.
As arrests have become more visible around the city, Pineyro has described the moment as tragic. “We have never experienced families being detained in our community,” he said in an online discussion with immigration attorney John De La Vega, according to Le Floridien.
He drew a distinction he says the administration is failing to honor: “There must be a difference between criminals, who should be deported, and families with pending cases.” Pineyro went further, Le Floridien reported, saying he “categorically” rejects the way some enforcement operations are being conducted and calling the detention of “hardworking people and professionals with pending immigration cases” inhumane.
Pineyro’s discomfort is not new.
When the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans early in 2025, he told CNN that he did not object to deporting people with criminal records but did not believe the president “should punish the vast majority of us who are hard-working people who have dreams and hopes and just want to provide for their families.”
That year he sponsored a Doral City Council resolution opposing the TPS termination for Venezuelans, telling colleagues, according to the Doral Family Journal, that the community “is not about Tren de Aragua,” a reference to the Venezuelan gang the administration has invoked to justify removals. The resolution passed 5-0.
The stakes in Doral are unusually concentrated.
The city is the largest Venezuelan-American community in the United States; about 40 percent of its roughly 84,000 residents are of Venezuelan descent, according to reporting by The Associated Press. Many arrived under humanitarian parole or TPS, programs the administration has since moved to end, leaving large numbers of legally present residents suddenly exposed to deportation. Pineyro has said he knows people whose asylum cases have gone unresolved for 15 or 20 years, delays he attributes to a backlogged system rather than to any wrongdoing by the applicants, according to Le Floridien.
Pineyro is not the first Trump supporter from a South Florida immigrant community to voice that frustration — and that is what gives his stance its weight. Weeks earlier, in Miami’s Little Haiti, the Haitian-Bahamian restaurateur Wilkinson “Ken” Sejour, known across the city as Chef Creole, said much the same thing after the end of TPS for Haitians battered his business. Sejour told CBS Evening News in an Aug. 5 interview that he had voted for Trump because “he sold to me that he is a businessman,” and said he regretted it. After federal agents detained a scooter rider steps from his restaurant and video spread online, fueling false rumors of a raid, he told Local 10, “You are taking key people, and now you are giving people the impression that it’s not even safe to come to my business.” Sejour said the loss of TPS had cost him workers and that he was weighing whether to close locations.
For CTN’s Haitian audience, the parallel is pointed.
Haitians and Venezuelans are two of the largest groups affected by the administration’s rollback of temporary protections — more than 300,000 Haitians lost TPS this summer, by some counts around 350,000 — and both communities in South Florida are now absorbing the same shock: that enforcement pitched as a campaign against dangerous criminals is reaching cooks, drivers, caregivers, professionals and parents with cases still winding through the system.
What unites Sejour and Pineyro, two men who backed the president, is a single objection: that enforcing immigration law should not mean treating working families and long-waiting asylum seekers as though they were the threat.
Neither man has renounced Trump outright, and both frame their criticism as a plea to change course rather than a political break. But their willingness to say it out loud, from inside communities that helped deliver the president votes in 2024, marks a shift in a region where support for his immigration platform once ran deep. As Pineyro put it, according to Le Floridien, the detentions represent, in his view, a failure of the system — not proof of guilt by the people caught in it.
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Source:
Chef Creole Is Not Alone: Doral Republican Pushes Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
