The Trump White House was warned that harsh sanctions on Venezuela could accelerate that country’s economic collapse and speed an exodus of millions of migrants to neighboring nations, according to three current and former U.S. government officials.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis delivered the classified assessments — part of a broader examination of how Venezuela’s economic implosion could affect migration in Latin America — to the White House National Security Council and the top two DHS officials in at least four reports between 2017 and 2019, the people said.
Today, however, Maduro remains in power, and a surge in Venezuelan immigrants has emerged as a flash point in the U.S. presidential election. Though Venezuelan mass migration to the United States only began after President Biden took office, concern among Trump officials about the sanctions’ potential effects, including on migration, was more extensive than previously known, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials.
“This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” said Thomas Shannon, who served as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department under President Donald Trump.