Reflections
May 2026 Reflection
TodoSomos and the Critical Dialogue
by David Robinson,Board Member TodoSomos; former US Ambassador (see bio)
May 13, 2026
Forced migrants lose many things, including their identity. They are quickly reduced to labels and categories. Sympathetic observers see need; skeptics see opportunism. Both are partly right, and both flatten people into types. Large, unplanned movements of people always contain mixed motives—flight from danger, hope for a better future, escape from past decisions, or simply the pull of staying close to others.
Bureaucracies, for their part, see issues. They define the problem in the terms available to them: budgets, programs, legal authorities. Migrants become units within that problem—mouths to feed, bodies to shelter, families to reunite. The reduction is not malicious; it is the triage logic of mass‑casualty response. Compassion may animate the work, but time, resources, and external pressures drive it.
Yet somewhere in that machinery are people—migrants and responders alike—caught in the same human drama. The best practitioners resist the expedience of treating migrants as an anonymous category of dependency. Like any good physician or teacher, they want to understand the person, not just the problem. They know that safeguarding dignity and respecting identity make cooperation possible and sharpen the tools used to meet the challenge.
That is why collecting first‑person accounts from migrants matters. These narratives affirm that the hardships of the journey have not stripped away identity or the claim to dignity, respect, and care. They also supply what our policies too often lack: direct evidence of how people actually move, suffer, adapt, and survive.
Todosomos is built for this work. Through its partnership with Cornell University and other collaborators, it offers a rare channel for migrants’ own voices to reach the public and the institutions that shape their lives. Making these accounts accessible is both a moral obligation and a practical necessity: it keeps migrants’ agency at the center of any effort to assist them and grounds program design in lived experience rather than conjecture.
April 2026 Reflection
Venezuela: Where We Are Today
by David Robinson (see bio)
April 8, 2026
U.S. policy toward Venezuela is caught between rewarding stability and promoting change. Its practical concern is preserving continuity favorable to U.S. economic interests; its public message is supporting regime change and democracy. Contradiction and confusion are not unusual in the Trump Administration.
The same uncertainty characterizes Trump’s relationship with Venezuelans in the United States. His immigration sweeps and looming TPS expirations provoke worry in newer arrivals, while removing Maduro earns praise with those more firmly established. In other words, Venezuelans in the U.S. are divided just like the rest of the county.
Foreign affairs gurus, journalists, and advocates will spill gallons of ink speculating on where the U.S. relationship with Venezuela is heading. All of them will be right depending on the time of day and whether the news cycle soothes or hurts Trump’s feelings. The only steady indication is where the money lies.
Today, true north is pointing at continuity under interim President Delcy Rodriguez with only lip service for democracy opposition leader Marina Corina Machado. Both have been praised and rebuked in roughly equal measure by Trump, but each continues to seek U.S. support beyond the White House. Rodriguez video conferenced with investors in Miami recently while Machado spoke, in person, to an energy gathering in Houston.
Rodriguez has the upper hand: oil. Machado tried to counter with ego flattery, giving Trump her Nobel Peace Prize as a companion to the ludicrous FIFA award, but its monetized value is insignificant compared to Merey 16, the crude oil pumped in the Orinoco Belt. Trump is indifferent to democratic change in Venezuela, but only if it keeps the oil flowing and preserves U.S. leverage over its profit. Keeping the Maduro team on a leash is the better bet right now.
What does that mean for Venezuelan immigrants? Nothing new. Immigrants already know they have no value to this Administration except as scapegoats and Venezuelans are no exception. The instability they face both here and in their native home is of no consequence to the President, his Cabinet, or his acolytes in Congress, and neither is the reputational and moral hazard their animosity toward "the other" creates for the United States as a whole.
The Trump regime is purely transactional, just like the Maduro shadow it left in place. Appeals to principles, decency, and international obligations are meaningless. Instead, follow the money. Today, restricted access to the Strait of Hormuz puts a slight premium on restoring Venezuelan oil production as quickly as possible, an argument for continuity in Caracas. Tomorrow is up for grabs. Perhaps the only comforting vision for immigrants is a Republican shipwreck at the midterm elections. In the meantime, their only respite lies in the kindness of neighbors and the integrity of most jurists. Neither are on display in the White House or Capitol Hill.