President Trump's top congressional allies in the Venezuela crisis are urging him to grant emergency legal status to thousands of people who have fled strongman Nicolas Maduro’s rule.

“It is obviously too dangerous for Venezuelan nationals to return to their country,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote in a Thursday afternoon letter to the president.

President Trump’s team has been mulling the possibility of granting Temporary Protected Status, a legal protection from deportation that can be granted to people who confront “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in their home country, for weeks. They haven’t come to a decision yet, but congressional support for the proposal is building as lawmakers look to alleviate the humanitarian crisis under way as Maduro defies international calls to relinquish power.

Rubio expects Venezuela to run out of basic food supplies "in a handful of days" as conditions in the country continue to deteriorate, the result of a political and economic crisis years in the making. Maduro-aligned security forces blocked, in late February, the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid that would have entered the country in coordination with Juan Guaido, the opposition leader who has been recognized as interim president by Trump and dozens of other Western leaders in the last six weeks.

The brewing humanitarian catastrophe has lent urgency to congressional calls for the administration to authorize the emergency legal status.

“We have this policy, actually, under review right now,” Special Envoy Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s point man for the Venezuela crisis, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee earlier Thursday. “There are 74,000 who are here, who applied for asylum, so they are in a sense being protected you might say by delays in that process but they have come to the United States.”

Rubio introduced legislation last week to grant the emergency reprieve to those Venezuelans, after Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, another Florida Republican who works closely with the administration to chart an aggressive course against Maduro and his Communist patrons in Cuba, offered the same idea in the House.

"The move would not only immediately help innocent Venezuelan citizens, but would demonstrate our nation’s commitment to supporting a safe democratic transition in Venezuela so that individuals can safely return home soon,” Rubio wrote Thursday.

The effort comes as the president's team, tasked with enforcing the president's restrictive immigration platform, has started revoking the legal status from hundreds of thousands of the program's beneficiaries. The administration assessed that the individuals were not legally eligible to remain in the program because the emergencies that provided the basis for their original protection had passed, some decades ago.

The political headwinds the emergency legal status faces can be inferred from the list of senators who joined Rubio on Thursday: 23 Democratic senators, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., but no other Republicans.

“Returning non-violent individuals back to Venezuela during this critical time of transition is not in the best long-term interests of the United States or our partners in the region,” they wrote, with a nod to skeptics of the proposal. “Moreover, TPS does not make a beneficiary eligible for legal permanent resident status or U.S. citizenship. When the TPS designation of a country is terminated, beneficiaries revert to the same immigration status they maintained before the designation.”