Trump blames Maduro for migrants, but a war in Venezuela could create millions of refugees

By Angélica Franganillo Díaz, CNN

(CNN) — When President Donald Trump has been asked about the reason he’s pressuring Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to step down and threatening military action against the country, he consistently blames the South American leader for two things: drugs and migrants.

“We just have to take care of Venezuela. They dumped hundreds of thousands of people into our country from prisons,” Trump told reporters last month in the Oval Office, though there’s no evidence migrants from Venezuela disproportionately served prison time.

As the Trump administration continues its strikes on alleged drug vessels at sea, the president has threatened that attacks against drug cartels on land in Venezuela would begin “very soon.” Experts who have modeled what would happen if Trump went ahead with even limited strikes warn Venezuela could see mass displacement and a new refugee surge like the 2017 crisis Trump blames on Maduro that led to thousands of Venezuelans moving to the US.

A Niskanen Center study released last month modeling refugee movements based on different types of US military action found that strikes could spur 1.7 million to 3 million additional people to flee Venezuela within just a few years if the attacks triggered a brief internal conflict.

If strikes triggered a protracted internal conflict, the study projected more than 4 million people could be displaced — overwhelming already-strained neighbors like Colombia and Brazil.

“Any kind of military strike would cause panic and disrupt supply chains, and it would be very easy for rumors to spread and push people to flee — especially in a country where nearly everyone already has a family member abroad,” said Gil Guerra, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center and one of the study’s authors.

If the US waged limited strikes not aimed at removing the Maduro administration and largely focused on drug-trafficking infrastructure, the refugee numbers could be limited to fewer than 20,000, the study found.

In the unlikely event of a full-scale U.S. intervention, the study warned, displacement could range from hundreds of thousands to more than 4 million, depending on how quickly stability is restored.

“You only see a major refugee crisis in the scenario of a prolonged armed confrontation,” Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told CNN. “But that scenario is perfectly plausible — parts of the armed forces could go into resistance or join guerrilla and criminal group.”

The likelihood, according to experts, is that most of those refugees would end up in neighboring countries and wouldn’t reach the US. But the last time Venezuela had a major crisis, thousands of migrants made their way to America.

The number of Venezuelan-born migrants living in the US surged during Trump’s first presidency — climbing by roughly 140,000 between 2017 and 2021, according to census data.

The last surge of Venezuelan migrants

That rise in immigrants to the US from Venezuela was fueled by a convergence of crises: the collapse of global oil prices, years of mismanagement and corruption inside PDVSA — Venezuela’s state-owned oil company and the government’s main source of revenue — and a rapid slide into hyperinflation that wiped out salaries and gutted the country’s ability to import food and medicine.

The US had begun sanctioning Venezuelan entities linked to PDVSA as early as 2008, but those measures hardened significantly in 2017 as Washington expanded financial restrictions on the Maduro government.

Research cited by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that these strengthened sanctions further strained Venezuela’s collapsing economy and contributed to worsening shortages and humanitarian conditions.

As foreign reserves evaporated and shortages deepened, in 2017 the Maduro government sidelined the opposition-led National Assembly, sparking massive nationwide protests and a sweeping crackdown in which security forces responded with heavy-handed force, killing numerous demonstrators.

The political rupture and economic free fall set the stage for the mass exodus that followed.

Henrique, who requested to be identified only by his first name due to fear of repercussions, left Venezuela in August 2017 and now lives in the United States.

He said the decision to leave was driven by a combination of political repression and an economic collapse already several years underway.

“In 2017 we were already living in a dictatorship,” he said, noting that after the opposition won parliamentary elections in 2015, the Maduro government moved to dismantle the National Assembly and strip it of power. “The economy had been in ruins since 2014 — hyperinflation, no jobs, no decent salaries — and this was all before the sanctions.”

Henrique said that for students his age, staying no longer felt possible.

“If you’re 17 or 18 and you see the economy destroyed and the regime destroying democratic institutions, you really don’t have any option but to look abroad,” he said. “I left, like 90% of my high school class. And like us, 8 million people.”

The struggling economy was the biggest driver of the surge in Venezuelans leaving, according to experts.

“Venezuelan migration is fundamentally economic,” Rodríguez said.

A 2022 study Rodríguez published with the Fourth Freedom Forum found that while Venezuela’s crisis began years earlier than the 2017 surge, US sanctions in 2019 — particularly those targeting the oil sector — sharply accelerated the country’s economic collapse by cutting off its primary source of foreign revenue.

“The country lost three-quarters of its economy — a 71% contraction — and sanctions significantly worsened that collapse,” he said.

Trump initially targeted officials and Venezuelan debt with sanctions in 2017, but the 2019 oil sanctions marked a turning point, cutting off PDVSA from its primary export markets. Rodríguez said those sanctions effectively choked the company, slashing foreign income and triggering a deeper collapse in production, hyperinflation and widespread shortages that deepened an already historic economic contraction.

“When you shut down the sector that provides 96% of the country’s income, you dramatically worsen the collapse,” he said.

The combination of initial financial crises worsened by sanctions led to a massive exodus. The number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants jumped sharply beginning in 2017, climbing from just over 1 million people to more than 5 million by 2021, according to figures compiled by the UN-backed R4V Coordination Platform — one of the largest displacement crises in the world.

While the flow of those leaving the country abated in the subsequent years, Trump’s return to office has marked a sharp escalation in rhetoric, including military threats, toward the country, sparking fears of more upheaval.

Trump has not said how he expects to end the standoff between Venezuela and the US that has seen more than 15,000 American troops and a carrier strike group moved into the region. While there have been indications that diplomacy might still be possible, with Trump and Maduro speaking by phone last month, no clear off-ramp has emerged.

Although a conflict could trigger another mass migration, former US Ambassador to Venezuela James Story said he does not expect large-scale displacement from limited, targeted strikes, what some analysts view as one of the more likely actions Trump could take. Story told CNN the humanitarian fallout would likely be far more contained than broader modeling suggests.

“If the US took kinetic action, it would pale in comparison to the millions who’ve already fled,” he told CNN. “I don’t think you’d see many people flee at all.” He added that if targets were limited to cartel-linked infrastructure along the Colombia border — “a clandestine airstrip, a drug lab — migration would likely remain minimal.”

“The only way I see a humanitarian crisis is if there is widespread, sustained military combat,” Story said.

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