Of the nearly nine million illegal migrants that Joe Biden has allowed into the United States since taking office, a significant percentage of them came here from Venezuela. There were 50.000 of them just in the month of September, setting a record that still stands today. The vast majority of them were simply allowed to stay, receiving court dates to make their asylum claims as much as a decade in the future. But to his credit, Biden managed to have a small number of the worst of the worst rounded up from time to time and put on planes to fly back to their native country. That process began last October after an informal agreement was reached between the White House and Nicolas Maduro. But now the flights have ended after Biden reimposed some sanctions on Venezuela over its failure to proceed with fair and open elections. Maduro ordered a ban on deportation flights and there are few signs that this will change in the near future. So what do we do with the migrants now? (Wall Street Journal, subscription required.)
Venezuela has followed through on a threat to stop accepting flights of migrants deported from the U.S. and Mexico, people familiar with the measures say, adding pressure on President Biden as a surge in illegal migration becomes a key issue in this year’s presidential election.
President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime introduced the measure after Washington reimposed some of the economic sanctions it had previously lifted on Venezuela. The U.S. said that Caracas has failed to live up to the loose pledges it made to restore the democratic order and move toward holding fair presidential elections. Venezuela has also asserted a claim to a resource-rich region of neighboring Guyana, drawing further warnings from the U.S.
The almost weekly flights from the U.S. to Venezuela came to a stop in late January, U.S. officials said, after an initial deal was struck in October. The chances of restarting them now appear bleak as relations between the two sides deteriorate, according to people involved in the discussions.
We already had sanctions in place against Venezuela under the Trump administration. In fact, Trump didn’t even recognize Nicolas Maduro as the president of the country, instead giving the nod to Juan Guaido, who was named interim president by the legislature until they removed that honor in December of 2022. Maduro simply ignored the vote and continued running the country as a dictator, still doing so today. Joe Biden lifted those sanctions upon taking office but has now reimposed some of them. This sort of inconsistent, unsteady leadership leads to unpredictable results such as the one we’re seeing here.
This is, however, one of those foreign policy situations where all of the blame can’t be placed on Biden’s shoulders. Maduro is a thug and he’s not an ally of the United States or the West. He has fostered much closer relationships with Russia, China, and Iran in recent years. Expecting him to help us address the Biden border crisis would be a fool’s errand.
So what other options are available in terms of expelling all of these illegal aliens, specifically the ones from Venezuela? Joe Biden would probably welcome the chance to take this as an excuse to simply allow them all to stay. hoping to eventually convert them into newly minted Democrat voters. But whether he makes a good-faith effort to deport some of them or we have to wait for Trump (hopefully) to do it, a solution is required.
Ignoring Maduro’s order and attempting to land commercial airlines in Caracas anyway isn’t really an option. He would likely order the planes to be seized and we would wind up with the crew becoming even more American hostages for him to hold. But there are other options on the table. We’re still somehow maintaining fairly good relations with Colombia. We could land planeloads of migrants in Bogata and simply hand them their walking papers. It’s only about 150 miles from there to the Venezuelan border. Anyone who was able to survive the trek all the way through Central America and Mexico to illegally enter our country should be able to make the trip without too many issues. And even if they just turned around and headed north again, they would at least be somebody else’s problem for a while.
I’m not getting my hopes up that Joe Biden will suddenly change course and do the right thing when it comes to the migrant crisis. It’s simply not in his character to do so. At most, he’ll apply a little window dressing with a vague executive order in response to his disastrous polling numbers and the growing popularity of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, we remain overwhelmed and the people of Venezuela struggle under the heavy hand of their dictator with no honest elections on the horizon. It’s a very sad situation.