Children like Samantha are the core group currently eligible for Colombia’s temporary protection permit (PPT), since eligibility for adults was restricted in 2023.
Colombia established the PPT programme in 2021 to encourage Venezuelans to seek legal immigration status.
It was hailed as a breakthrough in addressing the migration and refugee crisis: The permits are valid until 2031 and allow Venezuelans to access Colombia’s education system, employment and other services.
Andrés Moya, a professor at the Universidad de Los Andes School of Economics, has studied the benefits of the PPT.
He found that Venezuelans with regularised immigration status had higher monthly incomes, better health and higher consumer spending. And it costs the Colombian government less to support them, compared with migrants and refugees without documents.
The upside is particularly evident with children, Moya added.
“If we invest in these children, they’re going to be in a better position later on in life to contribute back, to work, to create their own businesses, to increase consumption,” he said.
If not, Moya warned, families are “going to either keep migrating and increasing the crisis throughout the region, or they’re going to become a burden to the system”.
But since USAID stopped distributing foreign assistance, the programme that processes the special permits — called the “Visibles” project — has sputtered.
Some Visibles offices reopened on February 28 with a skeleton staff. The Colombian government has had to rehire employees with its own funds.
There were originally 171 staff processing documents nationwide before the aid freeze, according to a spokesperson for Colombia’s migration agency. Now, the government hopes to keep 92.
When the sites shut down around the country last month, Llano Medina said only a single person was left on the Medellín staff — a programme coordinator — to handle high-level complaints.
She credited her informal link to that coordinator with helping to save an eight-month-old child’s life. When the Venezuelan infant contracted a high fever in late February, the coordinator managed to arrange an emergency PPT so the baby could receive hospital care.
She worried other children without documents might not get the same help in an emergency.
From 2021 until the funding freeze, Llano Medina estimated that she registered at least 1,500 kids for their PPTs. She showed Al Jazeera the three notebooks and two tablets where she writes out each child’s information and stores their pictures to fill out their paperwork.
Now, she struggles to scrape together bus fare to get to the hospital for her volunteer shift.
“It’s a commitment that I make from the heart. I like contributing because, honestly, there aren’t many people who do it for free,” she said.
Llano Medina pointed to Samantha as one of the lucky ones. The five-year-old’s fever eventually broke, and within days, she felt well enough to go to school.
But her mother, Loaiza, still worries about what may happen next time they face a medical emergency. She plans to restart the PPT registration process for both Samantha and Clarion once her local migration office can rehire staff.
“What gives us hope is knowing that once the process opens up, we can finally get rid of this burden,” she said. “They’ll have health insurance… and we won’t be turned away.”
