The Venezuelan socialist dictatorship is threatening to use the border crisis to extract economic concessions from President Joe Biden.
Delcy Rodríguez, the vice president of the socialist Venezuelan regime, warned that the country could stop repatriation flights of illegal Venezuelan immigrants showing up at America’s borders and take other similar measures if the Biden administration reinstates sanctions against Venezuela’s economy.
The State Department announced Tuesday that it would reimpose sanctions on the Venezuelan mining sector and could do the same to the country’s oil and gas sector by April after the Venezuelan regime repeatedly violated a Biden administration-brokered deal to hold free and fair presidential elections in exchange for sanctions relief.
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“If they make the mistake of intensifying the economic aggression against Venezuela at the request of their extremist lackeys, repatriation flights for Venezuelan migrants will be immediately revoked as of Feb. 13,” Rodríguez wrote in a Tuesday post on X, formerly Twitter, according to a Wall Street Journal translation.
Between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, Border Patrol recorded roughly 435,000 encounters with Venezuelan migrants who crossed the southern border illegally, according to data published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In October 2023, the Biden administration began sending deportation flights back to Venezuela, but Venezuelan migrants are still pouring into the U.S.
Weeks after those flights began, the Biden administration brokered a de facto oil-for-democracy deal with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Barbados, but Venezuelan authorities moved to suspend the leading opposition candidate’s primary election victory shortly after agreeing to the deal.
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The government arrested 33 people — including members of the opposition party, civil society and reporters — last week, and the top court in Venezuela ruled Friday to uphold an electoral ban against María Corina Machado, the opposition’s leading politician. Machado has also alleged that the government is harassing its opponents and has abducted members of the opposition, according to the BBC.
Oil is crucial to Venezuela’s economy, which has effectively disintegrated since socialism took hold in the country. In recent years, oil export revenues have financed about two-thirds of the Venezuelan government’s annual budget, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, and the government is expecting that the sanctions loosened by the Biden administration could drive a near-30% increase in its revenues this year, according to Reuters.
In the time since the Biden administration eased the sanctions on Venezuelan oil production, Venezuela has sold oil to buyers that reportedly include Sinochem, China’s state-owned oil and petrochemicals company, according to Reuters.
Neither the State Department nor the White House responded immediately to requests for comment.
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