OPINION:
The scenes from Jan. 3 are already fading from the news cycle, but the implications aren’t. At 4 a.m. that Saturday, Venezuelans flooded the streets of Doral, Florida, waving flags, banging pots, popping champagne, as word spread that Nicolas Maduro’s regime had finally collapsed.
Weeks later, buried beneath Minneapolis headlines, that celebration presents a question Washington can no longer dodge: What happens now to the roughly 700,000 Venezuelans whose status has been rightfully terminated? Especially now that the regime that justified it is finished and their homeland needs rebuilding.
The tyrant is gone. For millions who fled socialist collapse, the nightmare that drove them from their homeland is finally over.
Many will want to go back. They should. Venezuela needs its doctors, engineers, teachers and workers to rebuild what Chavismo destroyed. “I really want to contribute to recovering my country,” one Venezuelan in Cincinnati told reporters. That impulse deserves support, but it won’t be universal.
For years, the Maduro regime refused to accept deportees, and the Biden administration used this as a convenient excuse to release Venezuelans en masse into the U.S. They could have detained them. They could have rolled out GPS monitoring nationwide. They chose not to.
The numbers are damning. From fiscal years 2021 through 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded roughly 764,000 encounters with Venezuelan nationals. Total deportations during that entire period? Approximately 3,256. Three-quarters of a million encounters. Barely 3,000 removals.
The “nowhere to send them” line was a policy choice dressed up as logistical necessity, a fig leaf for an administration that treated mass release as a feature, not a bug.
President Trump changed the equation. His administration secured Mr. Maduro’s grudging cooperation and achieved more removals in months than President Biden managed in four years. More than 70 flights carried nearly 14,000 Venezuelans home. Mr. Maduro’s cooperation was always transactional: leverage to extract sanctions relief, subject to interruption whenever it suited him.
Now, that obstacle is gone forever and the enforcement pool is massive.
Roughly 600,000 Venezuelans lost temporary protected status after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration’s termination to take effect in October. Another 117,000 lost their parole status under the Biden-era program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
More than 700,000 Venezuelans are now legally deportable, absent individualized relief.
A post-Maduro government won’t treat repatriation as a bargaining chip. It will treat it as a national priority. Venezuela hemorrhaged nearly 8 million people under Hugo Chavez and Mr. Maduro. A legitimate government will want them back to rebuild.
For critics calling this “another Iraq,” the comparison is lazy and wrong.
Until the late 1990s, Venezuela was one of Latin America’s most stable democracies. From 1958 through Chavez’s election in 1998, the country maintained continuous civilian rule, almost unmatched on a continent consumed by military dictatorships. The Chavez-Maduro regime was an ideological parasite imposed on Venezuelan culture, not an expression of it. No Sunni-Shiite blood feud. No jihadi ecosystem.
Venezuela is Western, Catholic and heir to four decades of democratic tradition. Remove the parasite, and the society returns to what it was.
Yes, Mr. Maduro had ugly friends: Russia, China, Iran, Cuba. They weren’t just propping up a dictator; they were also positioning themselves to control Venezuela’s vast energy reserves. Beijing and Moscow secured long-term oil contracts. Tehran used Venezuelan oil to evade sanctions.
A democratic Venezuela cuts off its hemispheric foothold and denies it leverage over global energy markets. That makes Venezuelan repatriation not just an immigration enforcement priority but also a national security imperative.
The Biden administration welcomed more than 700,000 Venezuelans through open borders, parole schemes and expansions of temporary protective status, with no plan for what came next. Now we have an answer: repatriation to rebuild.
Venezuelans who want to return home and help reconstruct their country should be celebrated and assisted. Those who refuse should understand that the logistical barriers that once made their eventual deportation impossible have collapsed along with the regime.
After years of promises, voters demanded enforcement at scale. Venezuela is not the focus of that mandate; it is an opportunity within it. With the collapse of the Maduro regime, one of the largest bottlenecks has been removed. The task now is to deliver the broad, durable enforcement voters have been promised. Deportation flights continue.
Mr. Maduro is gone. Venezuela is free. The joyful returns should begin immediately.
For those who will not return voluntarily, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must be prepared to execute the law en masse.
• RJ Hauman is president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement.
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