CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s government announced a deal with President Joe Biden for the “orderly, safe, and legal” deportation of Venezuelan migrants via the Vuelta a la Patria (“Return to the Homeland”) program.
The statement was issued hours after the Biden administration announced it would resume deportation flights of illegal Venezuelan migrants who cross the US-Mexico border. Neither country has elaborated on the terms of the agreement.
In the Foreign Ministry statement, the regime of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro claimed that the Venezuelan migrant crisis, which it had repeatedly said did not exist prior to this declaration, is a “direct consequence” of the sanctions imposed upon the rogue socialist regime and an alleged “blockade” to the country’s economy.
#Comunicado El Gobierno del presidente @NicolasMaduro anuncia que, en el marco de las conversaciones sostenidas con las autoridades de los Estados Unidos de América, ha suscrito un acuerdo sobre migración que permita la repatriación ordenada, segura, y legal de ciudadanos… pic.twitter.com/1uwSzy3zSz
— Yvan Gil (@yvangil) October 5, 2023
According to international organizations, more than 7.7 million Venezuelan citizens — roughly 25 percent of the country’s estimated 30.5 million citizens — have fled their country and the collapse of its socialist system as of August. The number of Venzuelan migrants is likely to be higher than these estimates, as organizations such as the R4V platform base their estimates on data provided by each of the region’s governments and not all of them are up to date.
Last year, the Maduro regime claimed that the Venezuelan migrant crisis was false, describing the then six-million refugees as “phantom migrants” during a dialogue with the United Nations’ Human Rights Council and the Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela held in September 2022.
“Venezuela will deploy, through its ‘Return to the Homeland’ program, the necessary resources for the comprehensive care of our repatriated nationals, in strict observance of the protection that the Constitution and the laws of the country provide for them,” the Foreign Ministry vowed this week.
The “Return to the Homeland” program, launched by Nicolás Maduro in 2018, allows Venezuelan migrants abroad to voluntarily sign up for socialist regime aid to return through scheduled flights. The regime has made no internal changes since launching the program to entice the refugees who fled its policies to return.
The flights, which mostly come from Latin American countries such as Peru and Chile, usually see an average of 80 to 160 migrants return per flight.
It is difficult to ascertain the actual number of Venezuelan migrants who have returned to their country during the past five years through the program or on their own, as the Maduro regime has provided an array of different, inconsistent “official” numbers throughout the years.
Maduro first claimed in March 2022 that 350,000 Venezuelans had returned to their country as a result of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic – despite the country only lifting Coronavirus-related restrictions on Venezuela’s limited commercial flights in November 2022.
By April 2022, the Maduro regime claimed that some 28,500 Venezuelans had taken advantage of the Return to the Homeland program. In August of that year, it claimed the number had passed 29,100. In September 2022, Maduro claimed that “more than half” of Venezuelans who left their country between 2018 and 2021 had returned.
Two months later, the Maduro regime stated that 31,065 migrants returned through the “humanitarian” Return to the Homeland program, claiming, without providing evidence, that those who returned have “better living conditions than those they achieved in the host nations.” Then, in December, Venezuelan state media claimed that the number of people who returned through the regime’s program jumped to 270,000. However, local media — and even the regime’s transport minister — stated that only 2,060 migrants had returned through the program in the entire year.
By September 2023, the Maduro regime had inflated the number of alleged returnees to 342,880 – an amount that, even if accurate, only represents roughly 4.45 percent of the total estimate of 7.7 million migrants.
In contrast, some 50,000 Venezuelan migrants reportedly crossed the US-Mexico border during September alone, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security obtained by CBS News.
Additionally, more than 58,000 have obtained advanced travel authorization to enter the United States though the Biden Administration’s “Humanitarian Parole” process, which allows up to 30,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan citizens per month to request entry into the United States, granting them the ability to stay and work for up to two years.
The Biden Administration also recently expanded the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) it first granted in 2021 to Venezuelans in the United States, providing protection from removal and employment authorization to Venezuelan individuals who entered the United States before July 31, 2023.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.