The crisis in Venezuela has resulted in the world’s largest mass migration in recent history: More than 7.7 million people have left the country since 2014, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.
The current protests and tensions following Sunday’s election and the impasse over who was legitimately elected raise questions about whether more Venezuelans will be leaving the country.
The U.S. has recognized opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia as the president-elect, based on evidence the opposition released this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday night.
But Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government insists he won though it hasn’t released all the voting machine tallies to prove this — something the U.S. and other countries are urging the government to do.
The U.S. State Department, through a spokesperson, Vedant Patel, said this week that “the international community, including the United States, is running out of patience waiting for Venezuelan electoral authorities to be honest and publish complete and detailed data on the elections so that “everyone can see the results."
After 25 years of autocratic rule, a significant portion of Venezuelans in the country and in exile had enormous expectations of change.
But the announcement by the National Electoral Committee (CNE) giving victory to Maduro could now cement despair and worsen the exodus.
More than 40% of Venezuelans surveyed before the election said they would consider leaving the country if Maduro remained in power.
“I think we are going to see days of protests, the regime will seek to repress them or simply wait for them to subside” without addressing the complaints, and then people may see no other option but to leave, Ryan C. Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Axios Latino.
The U.S. has seen huge migration shifts from the crisis in Venezuela: According to a Pew Research Center analysis, there were an estimated 640,000 Latinos of Venezuelan origin living in the U.S. — a 592% increase since 2000.
According to CBP figures released in July, from June 2022 to January, some 110,541 Venezuelans arrived in the U.S. legally and have been granted parole. As of September 2023, there were 242,700 Venezuelans in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. At that time this protection was extended, and it was estimated that another 472,000 additional Venezuelan citizens would be eligible.
In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston has said that more migrants per capita have arrived there than any other city in the last year.
Colorado state officials are already working to determine any possible local impact from the crisis in Venezuela, Denver Human Services spokesperson Jon Ewing told Axios reporter Alayna Alvarez on Monday.
If the city sees another surge in migrant arrivals, officials are not intending to go back to the model of providing several weeks of shelter to recently arrived migrants, Ewing said.
But it’s unclear how many migrants could actually reach U.S. cities like Denver considering Mexico has forcefully shut down the flow of people crossing north and President Joe Biden signed an executive action in June that drastically limits asylum requests.
In the last two months, border crossings have been at their lowest level since Biden took office in early 2021.
From migration to U.S. politics
Trump has said multiple times, including in a campaign email this week, that “countries, particularly Venezuela, are exporting their criminals to the United States.”
In May, a Georgia grand jury indicted José Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and is accused of killing and kidnapping 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley.
But as NBC News has reported, a slew of studies have found that both legal and undocumented immigrants commit less crime as a whole than native-born Americans.
Trump said in a speech in June that Venezuelans “crossed our border claiming that they feared for their lives in Venezuela, but you know, crime in Venezuela has gone down … because they have brought all the criminals here,” a statement he repeated before an audience of millions at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
But what Trump said is false. Although the number of violent deaths in Venezuela fell by close to 25% in 2023, compared to 2021 and 2022, according to data from the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, the decrease is part of a trend that has been observed since 2018 — when Trump was president.
The unprecedented wave of migration in Venezuela and the fact that there’s fewer people in the country reduces the numbers for “everything,” including death rates from cancer and traffic accidents, according to Ronna Rísquez, co-founder of Victims Monitor, which monitors violence as well as a co-founder of In.Visibles, which investigates victims of organized crime in Latin America.
As part of this exodus, some criminals have emigrated from Venezuela, not only to the U.S. but to other Latin American countries, said Carlos Nieto, coordinator of A Window to Freedom, an organization that defends and promotes human rights for Venezuelans. But of “those millions who have emigrated from Venezuela, criminals are the minority,” he said.
Although authorities have arrested 47 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang on U.S. soil from 2023 to 2024, that contrasts with the fact that last year more than 330,000 Venezuelans crossed the U.S. border.
In addition, experts on Venezuela told Noticias Telemundo that there is no evidence of a state policy aimed at sending criminals to other countries. “Here they are not really releasing prisoners to send them anywhere,” Nieto said.
The Trump campaign has also stated that Kamala Harris is “intentionally importing millions of illegals in hopes of turning them into Democratic voters,” which is also false.
Though Trump has said that Biden and Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration in order to register newcomers to vote, he has never offered evidence to support his claim. Immigrants who are not citizens cannot vote nor is there evidence of voter fraud perpetrated by migrants who are not citizens.
Jaime Florez, Hispanic communications director for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, told Noticias Telemundo that “the laws in place must be respected” when asked what immigration measures regarding Venezuelans in the U.S. — such as Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole — they propose to change or maintain. “The campaign does not comment on hypothetical situations,” Florez said, adding that “the Republican National Committee’s statement is identical to that of the Trump campaign."
Maca Casado, Hispanic media director for the Harris campaign, said that while she couldn’t anticipate what a Harris administration foreign policy would do, Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. “Harris will not abandon Venezuelans, she has not done so in the past,” Casado said, pointing out the administration has been “supporting the Venezuelan people and asking for the voting records” of Sunday’s elections.
In Florida, where there’s a big Venezuelan American population, elected officials from both parties are calling for more U.S. sanctions on Venezuela following the disputed election results, with Republicans criticizing the Biden administration’s easing of some sanctions in 2023. But Florida International University political science professor Eduardo Gamarra told Politifact this ignores the fact that Maduro stayed in power in Venezuela despite tougher sanctions from the Trump administration.