October 16, 2025 - 6:30pm
There are many reasons why Donald Trump’s planned regime-change operation in Venezuela is a bad idea. One, under-discussed thus far, is that it will turbocharge the very border crisis the President and his allies have made their signature political priority.
Trump’s military pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the country’s role in the international drug trade, which current and former US officials explicitly told the New York Times is a pretext for regime change, has been dramatically ramping up. The Trump administration has embarked on a major build-up of naval forces near the country, dispatching eight warships, F-35 fighter planes, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine to the southern Caribbean, along with thousands of troops. What’s more, Trump has now reportedly authorised the CIA to carry out covert action against Venezuela, including land-based strikes.
In the words of the US President, “they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and “allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners [and] people from mental institutions” to travel north and puncture the US border. This is not actually true. But, ironically, Trump could be on the verge of making it reality. That is, if he presses on with his plans to oust Maduro.
A US war against Venezuela, or even covert action that “cleanly” creates a power vacuum in the country, has a high chance of driving a flood of Venezuelan migrants to the US southern border to escape the resulting violence and deprivation. Trump’s team may tell themselves that this is already happening under Maduro’s rule, while ignoring the role of years of pitiless US sanctions in driving this migration, something they were explicitly warned about in his first term. Yet US officials should know from years of foreign policy failures in the Middle East that an authoritarian ruler, no matter how brutal, is often better for stability and order than an empty throne.
War doesn’t tend to make human beings stay in place. Neither does the chaos that often follows regime change. The European migrant crisis was a direct result of the many US regime-change wars in the Middle East that Trump once disdained, which displaced millions of people and sent millions more fleeing beyond those countries’ borders.
A particularly instructive example is what Trump once derided as “Hillary Clinton’s disaster in Libya” in 2011, where the United States similarly embarked on an improvised, ill-thought-out regime-change operation, producing a years-long civil war and virtual anarchy in the country that pushed hundreds of thousands to leave for Europe. Five years after regime change in Libya, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Italy exploded nearly 600%. Trump’s plans for Venezuela risk doing the same thing, only this time on America’s doorstep rather than Europe’s.
What’s more, prisons don’t tend to stay locked and secure when dictators are toppled. Countries including Syria, Libya, and Iraq all saw prisons broken into and sometimes thousands of inmates freed when their governments fell. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein purposefully freed tens of thousands of prisoners in advance of the US invasion, and it is not hard to imagine Maduro, who is already giving Venezuelan civilians guns and military training to head off a US attack, doing something similar.
Though Trump officials might revel in having further cause to ramp up their immigration crackdown, this will likely not benefit them. Support for the President’s immigration policies is already underwater; and no matter how heavy-handed his response, he will likely take the public blame for a chaotic surge of Venezuelan migrants at the border just as Joe Biden did. In Biden’s case, it was a key factor in the unravelling of his presidency. Trump would be wise to change course, but that would mean reclaiming foreign policy on this issue from the neoconservatives to whom he has outsourced it.
BMarchetich
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe