Caracas Chronicles

In Political Science, there’s this well-known metaphor used to describe an issue that is tossed around between parties but with no actual resolution: political football. In the U.S., these are issues like social security, healthcare and taxes – and they tend to increase at election season, especially in 2024. More than half a million –tabulated– Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. are caught in the crossfire of the race for the White House as they are ignored and even hindered by both parties for political leverage, while polling numbers increase pressure to deal with the southern border and the public narratives in the country are each day more polarized.

At the same time, only 35% of Venezuelans have U.S. citizenship compared to Cuba’s 67%, for example. These numbers are insufficient to make Venezuelan concerns represented on party platforms, as there’s no sizable cohesive Venezuelan vote. They are politically disenfranchised from both their country of origin and their country of adoption. Yet their lives are greatly affected by the uncertainty of the political outcomes of both nations.

While some Venezuelans are politically active in both parties organizing or working in the administrative positions, in the greater scale the Venezuelan community and its issues have become not much more than a soundbite, a good-looking line to put on campaign ads, or at times, just another political weapon. 

The Elephant in the Room

First of all, the public in the States is being bombed with unsustained allegations about an exponential rise of violent crime brought by Venezuelan gangs. The Biden administration acknowledged the presence of Tren de Aragua, but its scale has been enormously exaggerated by the Trump campaign, to the detriment of the reputation of the Venezuelan community.

This is not the first time Republicans have exploited the Venezuelan situation. Already in 2020 former Trump lawyer Sydney Powell claimed that one of the main reasons why Trump lost that year’s election was because there was “Venezuelan interference” in the voting machines. A baseless claim that resulted in a failed lawsuit for Trump. Nonetheless, over these past months the Republican narrative on Venezuela has significantly shifted. While the GOP has long used the Venezuelan crisis as a boogeyman to counter “socialist” proposals, Republicans rarely targeted Venezuelan migrants directly. 

Now, Republicans no longer talk about Venezuela as a crisis, not even Trump is speaking much about Maduro or even Edmundo González for that matter. When they speak about Venezuela it’s to talk about illegal “aliens”.

One of the best examples of this targeting is the incendiary narrative of Senator Mike Lee, a possible pick for Attorney General in a second Trump administration. He has repeatedly portrayed undocumented Venezuelans as violent criminals, he called for the Venezuelan presidential plane recently seized in the Dominican Republic to be used to deport people back to Venezuela, and he has even falsely claimed that undocumented Venezuelans have it “easy” to vote illegally in American elections and rig them; an argument that he made the spearhead of his SAVE act campaign on Capitol Hill that almost caused a government shutdown a couple of weeks ago.

Biden expanded the TPS and Humanitarian Parole programs that benefitted Venezuelans more than any other nationality, but the ever-growing controversy surrounding the southern border led the Democratic leadership to adjust immigration policy towards a significantly conservative approach.

Lee is just one senator out of a hundred, no matter how well-connected he is in MAGAworld. What gives his narrative its relevance is the fact that the Trump campaign embraced it. Probably the most infamous falsehood that Trump has spread about Venezuela is that currently Caracas is safer than any city in the United States because Maduro sent all criminals to the U.S. This falsehood has repeated in numerous interviews, rallies, and even his RNC acceptance speech. Even his top senior aide Stephen Miller had a meltdown in the post-debate spin room when confronted by a Chilean-Venezuelan journalist on Trump’s claims. This is a narrative that has been thoroughly adopted by the MAGA field, trivializing the numerous dangers Venezuelans endure, precisely what makes them try to migrate here in the first place. 

Trump promises to “massively deport those people back to Venezuela”, calling this proposal “Operation Aurora”. He even expanded his immigration platform to now attack legal immigration too. Probably influenced by his running mate JD Vance, Trump has now promised to deport the thousands of migrants that reside in the U.S. legally under the Humanitarian Parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs. When combining the statistics from both Parole and TPS, Trump’s promised deportation of “criminals” would affect more than 430,000 Venezuelans living in the United States legally. These are just the greatest hits by the way, Trump’s platform is actually filled with numerous and legally dubious ways that can and will affect Venezuelan migrants extensively.

If Trump can actually pull this off –legally or economically– is subject of another discussion. But the fact that a man at the doorstep of the most powerful office in the world is trying to falsely tie most Venezuelan migrants to organized crime and is actively calling for their removal regardless of legal status is concerning. Not all GOP politicians agree with this dangerous rhetoric, but Trump holds the reins of the party and he’s making sure that through the politics of fear the American people think of Venezuelans not as migrants fighting for the American Dream but as criminals looking to occupy your house, steal your job and harm your kids. A narrative that is already starting to have very dangerous consequences for other migrant communities.

The Donkey’s contradiction

While in their message they always talk about migrant diversity and the revival of the “American dream”, Democrats tend to adopt restrictive policies that contradict their discourse when faced with political pressures. The Obama administration protected thousands of migrants under DACA, but also deported more than three million people; a record number then. Something similar is happening with the current administration. 

Now, Republicans no longer talk about Venezuela as a crisis, not even Trump is speaking much about Maduro or even Edmundo González for that matter. When they speak about Venezuela it’s to talk about illegal “aliens”.

Biden expanded the TPS and Humanitarian Parole programs that benefitted Venezuelans more than any other nationality, but the ever-growing controversy surrounding the southern border led the Democratic leadership to adjust immigration policy towards a significantly conservative approach.

The best example of this is Biden’s failed bipartisan border bill which was cosponsored with the Republican Senator James Lankford. While the bill expands certain visa programs, it significantly restricts the asylum process by adding more hurdles to an already complicated process and making deportation easier. In a sense, it’s quite amusing to see the Democratic party push for an immigration bill that supported the construction of the border wall while awarding more than $28 billion to ICE and the border patrol. Two policies that Democrats heavily criticized Trump for during his administration. Ironically, the quite conservative bipartisan border deal that could complicate the situation for Venezuelans became the bedrock of Kamala Harris’ immigration policy. 

The Biden administration also decided recently to take a page of the Trump handbook and walked back the aforementioned humanitarian parole that allowed thousands of Venezuelans to reside in the U.S., leaving many of them without any legal path to avoid deportation unless other means are provided. 

Both Biden and Harris have been more active on the Venezuelan crisis than Trump, by voicing their support for Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez. The Vice President and the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken exchanged calls and correspondence with both of them. However, the Biden-Harris administration’s kind gestures echoes Trump’s platform in many ways. 

Clearly, Venezuelans are not the target demographic for both campaigns. Again, not many of us are eligible to vote, so no candidate or party is trying to court the “Venezuelan vote”. Yet some of the public’s perception of Venezuelans is turning negative. At the same time, polarization started to divide the Venezuelan community as well, a trend that we allowed to happen back in Venezuela but that here in the U.S. should be out of the question. Nonetheless, we all should be invested in stopping Venezuelan issues being banalized to score political points and making us heard beyond the scope of electoral math. In a way, the only way to stop becoming a political football is by getting involved in the game.