Trump White House was warned sanctions on Venezuela could fuel migration

The Trump administration nevertheless imposed some of the harshest economic penalties in U.S. history on Venezuela in response to documented human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings and corruption by the regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro. The sanctions are fiercely defended by proponents, who say they were a necessary response to one of the most brutal crackdowns on civilians in two decades.

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.

“The sanctions clearly helped generate faster out-migration,” Shannon said. “And you knew it was only going to be a matter of time before these people decided to migrate north.”

U.S. sanctions have surged in the past two decades and are in effect in some form in almost a third of all countries. In the case of Venezuela, U.S. officials were — and remain — sharply torn over the financial fusillade.

Proponents, such as former top Trump aide John Bolton, defend the sanctions as a critically important, though unsuccessful, effort to force out Maduro, or at least limit the funds at his disposal. Venezuelans had already started fleeing before the sanctions were imposed, they stress, escaping an economic crisis rooted not in U.S. penalties but in mismanagement by Maduro and his predecessor, authoritarian leader Hugo Chávez.

In 2018, when Mauricio Claver-Carone saw the bottom falling out of the Maduro regime, he saw it as the kind of opportunity the Trump White House should seize.

Twenty years of mismanagement by Chavez and Maduro had collided with a global downturn in oil prices to almost shatter Venezuela’s economy, sparking inflation of more than 800 percent and chronic shortages of food and other goods. Maduro’s dictatorship viciously crushed widespread street protests, with political dissidents rounded up, jailed and even tortured.

Claver-Clarone, a senior official at the National Security Council, saw a viable opposition forming around Juan Guaidó, the leader of the country’s democratically elected National Assembly. He also saw clear signs of unrest among military officers, who could form a rival power base. The United States, he thought, had to act decisively and forcefully.

Obama administration sanctions on Venezuela had narrowly targeted Maduro allies and done little to prevent the broader crackdown. If the Trump administration could use sanctions to sabotage the state-run oil industry, through which Maduro secured the loyalty of the armed forces, Claver-Carone and other senior officials believed they could bolster Guaidó and reverse the nation’s descent into a humanitarian and political catastrophe. His approach was backed by Trump and Bolton, the national security adviser; a vocal group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill; and the leaders of many of Venezuela’s neighbors, such as Colombia and Ecuador.

Claver-Carone’s reasoning reflected in part why U.S. sanctions have become so frequently used: They carried much less risk to Americans than deploying troops to Venezuela, which Trump briefly considered. And they could deliver an immediate shock to an adversary refusing to respond to diplomatic overtures.

In 2017, Trump had imposed sanctions blocking the Venezuelan government and oil firms from accessing international credit markets. The administration expanded sanctions during the following three years to severely restrict oil exports, the lifeblood of Venezuela’s economy, particularly as the opposition movement to Maduro appeared to be gaining strength.

“If we were going to seize the moment — if we were going to do a campaign to restore the democratic order in Venezuela and change their government — we needed something that went to the maximum,” Claver-Carone said. “We needed the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time.”

Other government officials saw risks in that approach. U.S. sanctions are formally implemented by the Treasury Department, which had a chance to weigh in on every step.

At roughly biweekly coordinating meetings in the White House Situation Room, Treasury officials raised objections to the scope of most of Claver-Carone’s proposals, according to four people who attended the meetings, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe classified discussions.

“It was a screaming match almost once a week,” one person said.

As the Trump administration ratcheted up sanctions from 2017 to 2019, Treasury staffers arrived at the White House armed with data showing the Venezuelan economy was already disintegrating. The country was besieged not only by hyperinflation and a massive economic contraction, but also soaring infant mortality and a lack of safe drinking water.

At one point in the summer of 2018, Treasury representatives got into a shouting match with Claver-Carone in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building over their attempts to broaden humanitarian exemptions to allow more civilian goods into the country. Sigal Mandelker, then Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, cited examples of malnourished Venezuelans as a reason to be wary of the humanitarian consequences of overly broad U.S. sanctions, the people said. Her fears, two of the people said, were shared by Michael Kaplan, another senior Treasury official. Mandelker and Kaplan declined to comment.

“Across the Treasury staff, we were all asking, ‘What are the second and third order effects of this?’” one former official said. “Out-migration was one piece of that.”

The disputes went all the way to Trump’s Cabinet. In January or February 2019, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin expressed concern to Bolton over potential collateral damage from tighter sanctions, Bolton recalled in an interview.

“There was no doubt the sanctions, along with the general economic deterioration before we imposed them, was driving a lot of people out of the country,” Bolton said. “ … That, to me, was a way to put pressure on the country.”

As Venezuela’s economic collapse accelerated, U.S. officials throughout the federal government started keeping a closer eye on the surge of migrants out of the country.

Their concern, especially at first, was not that many would wind up in the United States. Instead, U.S. officials were worried about neighboring countries, particularly Colombia, which was struggling to absorb a massive influx. The numbers were startling: In a nation of 30 million people, more than 1 million had left Venezuela by 2017 — even before sanctions began to bite.

As U.S. authorities explored their options, DHS officials started analyzing how much worse the situation could get, including under much tighter sanctions. From 2017 to 2019, DHS officials produced these estimates approximately every six months. It’s not clear how many senior officials read the final reports assessing the potential for additional out-migration; several senior White House and Treasury officials under Trump said they were unaware of any internal estimates of sanctions’ effect on Venezuelan migration.

“The debate with the sanctions at the time within the White House and other agencies was: How do you not hurt the population?” one former senior intelligence official in the Trump administration said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal talks. From the intelligence community’s perspective, the official said, “the focus wasn’t just on the cause and effect through migration. It was, rather, ‘Hey, policymaker, as you’re contemplating X number of moving parts, this could be an outcome of your decision-making as well.’’’

Trump administration officials also appeared to be ignoring or downplaying warnings from U.S. allies. At a 2018 dinner in Mexico City, foreign ministry officials under left-wing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told senior Trump foreign policy aide Elliott Abrams that the administration’s Venezuela sanctions could lead to a stampede of migrants first through Mexico and then into the United States, according to two Mexican officials with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. In an interview, Abrams said he remembers the dinner and the Mexicans’ opposition to Venezuela sanctions, but not their migration warnings.

“They were concerned about the impacts of U.S. sanctions on migration outflows,” said John Creamer, a former State Department official who worked with Mexico from 2018 to 2021. Mexican officials later communicated to their U.S. counterparts: “Look, you guys, your policy toward Venezuela is producing these outflows …’” Creamer said. “They saw huge numbers of Venezuelans rolling through their country.”

One of the Mexican officials at the 2018 meeting said U.S. officials did not appear interested in hearing warnings about migration. “We told them several times, ‘This is going to happen,’” the official said. “And it did.”

Although the Colombian government supported the sanctions, officials at the local and national level were highly concerned that the move could lead millions more people to cross the border from Venezuela, said Diego Chaves-González, who at the time worked closely with the Colombian immigration agency as a consultant for the World Bank.

“Obviously, everyone was worried about the sanctions” as one of many factors that could fuel an increase in migration out of Venezuela, said Christian Krüger Sarmiento, then director of Colombia’s migration agency, who defends the measures as a justified attempt to oust Maduro. The concerns of Colombia’s migration agency were discussed by Treasury officials at the time, said two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

The deteriorating relationship between Caracas and Washington, due in part to sanctions, also made it more difficult for the U.S. to deport Venezuelans. After Biden eased sanctions on Venezuela, the Maduro regime allowed some deportation flights to resume — but this year, after Biden reimposed the sanctions, the flights again have stalled.

Many Trump officials, and even some U.S. officials who served during Democratic administrations, reject any attempt to link the sanctions to the migration crisis. The extent of economic mismanagement by Chavez and Maduro is difficult to overstate, they said: Venezuela’s authoritarian leaders raided the country’s piggy bank — its oil industry — draining it of investment and doling out billions to cronies to maintain their grip on power. Counterproductive price controls and exchange rate policies fueled the chaos. The country’s economy had contracted by double digits even before Trump took office.

How Venezuelans came to the United States is also heavily contested. Republicans argue they did so in large numbers only after Biden lifted Trump-imposed restrictions and implemented softer border policies.

Juan Cruz, who served as a senior official at the National Security Council under Trump, said of the effect of sanctions on migration: “Obviously, it contributed. But it’s not the cause.”

“The suffering of the people is due to the Venezuelan government,” Cruz continued. “Some people wanted to bring up second- or third-order consequences, and say, ‘If we do this, the Venezuelan people will be eating rock soup.’ They were already eating rock soup.”

Some Venezuelans who fled the country blame their government and U.S. sanctions.

Rosa Grande, 38, said she was optimistic about the sanctions when they were first imposed. She hopes Maduro will “go to jail because he destroyed my future, the future of my children, and the future of my country.”

But U.S. sanctions caused severe damage to her father’s business, she said, and that’s what forced her and her 13-year-old daughter to move to the United States in 2020. The sanctions “just led to more misery, and more hunger,” said Grande, who now lives in North Carolina.

Only one peer-reviewed academic publication has tried to quantify the proportion of the downturn caused by U.S. sanctions. It was written by Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist now at the University of Denver who was once intimidated by Maduro while he helmed the country’s budget office — and who says he warned Treasury officials under Trump of the potential effect on out-migration.

Rodriguez estimates that U.S. sanctions were responsible for about half of Venezuela’s economic contraction, which he estimates as being three times as deep as the Great Depression in the United States.

Venezuelans “left the country because the economy collapsed. And the economy collapsed partially because of sanctions,” he said. “There is overwhelming evidence of that.”

Shane Harris and Nick Miroff contributed to this report.