Recent minor changes in the relationship between the United States and Venezuela may signal that a greater degree of engagement between the two countries is possible in 2023, though experts remain doubtful that the Biden administration’s goal of seeing free and fair presidential elections there in 2024 is likely to be achieved.

U.S. oil firm Chevron this month took over operations at a major Venezuelan oil processing facility after the Treasury Department granted a limited license for the firm to import a small amount of Venezuelan crude oil into the U.S. Chevron is currently involved in four petroleum projects in the country.

The announcement of the lease came as representatives of the regime of Nicolás Maduro, whose presidency is disputed by the country’s opposition and not recognized by Washington, reached an agreement with opposition leaders on humanitarian aid. The deal will allow the United Nations to oversee the use of Venezuelan funds, frozen overseas by U.S.-led sanctions, to pay for humanitarian relief in the country totaling, by some estimates, roughly $3 billion or more.

Beginning of changes?

The oil leases and the unfreezing of funds for humanitarian aid, together, represent tiny cracks in the wall that has gone up between the U.S. and Venezuela in recent decades. Major obstacles remain to any meaningful rapprochement, and significant changes to the political landscape, both within Venezuela and in South America more broadly, significantly complicate an already difficult situation.

Still, a growing recognition that neither sanctions nor international backing for an interim government headed by Maduro’s chief political rival have produced positive change for the people of Venezuela may be forcing a reassessment of existing policies.

Another major factor is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown global energy markets into turmoil, making Venezuela’s huge oil reserves an enormously attractive resource for both the U.S. and its allies in Europe.

“Although U.S. government officials have insisted that U.S. policy towards Venezuela hasn’t changed, we have seen some evident changes,” Diego Area, deputy director for strategic development at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, told VOA. “I do believe that looking at 2023 we’ll see increased engagement between the U.S. and Venezuela.”

History of conflict

The U.S. relationship with Venezuela has been fraught since at least 1999, when former military officer and socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez assumed power after winning the country’s presidential contest promising to implement far-reaching leftist reforms. Chavez and Maduro, who took over the country when Chavez died in 2013, made opposition to the U.S. a signature element of their foreign policy, including, in Chavez’s case, after a failed 2002 coup attempt against him that some observers contended Washington was slow to condemn.

The relationship soured further in January 2019, after Maduro disputed the results of a presidential election held a month earlier and refused to cede power. The United States and dozens of other countries refused to recognize him as the legitimate president of Venezuela, throwing their support instead behind opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who much of the international community accepted as the true victor in the election.

In 2020, Maduro held parliamentary elections that were decried as a sham by the U.S. and many other countries. Since then, the U.S. has continued to recognize the previous parliament, elected in 2015, as the legitimate legislative body in the country, and has recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.

Punishing sanctions led by the U.S. have frozen overseas assets and have severely restricted the Maduro regime’s ability to sell oil on the open market — a major economic blow to a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Partly because of sanctions and partly because of economic mismanagement by the Chavez and Maduro regimes, the Venezuelan economy has shrunk dramatically, plunging millions into poverty and pushing millions more to leave the country, many seeking asylum in countries across Latin America and in the U.S.

Maduro, however, has maintained his grip on the country, and there are now reasons to believe that his position in the region is stronger than it has been in years.

Lima Group fragmented

In 2017, a group of primarily South American countries formed what became known as the Lima Group, in hopes of finding a way to end ongoing turmoil in Venezuela, which had spent three years wracked by riots over economic conditions and the repressive tactics of Maduro’s government.

When Maduro refused to cede power to Guaidó in 2019, the Lima Group formally denounced him and recalled ambassadors from the country.

Since then, however, changes in the leadership in a number of South American countries have resulted in multiple members of the Lima Group indicating a willingness to recognize Maduro once again. Argentina and Mexico left the group in 2021, and that same year Peru moved to recognize the Maduro government.

In particular, the replacement of center-right governments in neighboring Colombia and Brazil with left-leaning leaders has also led to a regional thaw toward Maduro. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has reopened his country’s borders with Venezuela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president-elect, has indicated that he intends to reestablish relations with Maduro as well.

“It makes life harder for the U.S., because Maduro’s 2023 goal is recognition — appearing as though countries are normalizing with him,” Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA.

“Having Lula normalize relations, having Petro meet with Maduro and opening the border, that plays into the narrative that Venezuela is becoming a normal country again,” he said. “So, if you’re the regime, looking out on the region, you feel much better about your situation today than you would have in 2019 or 2020, when the region was mostly center-right, and a lot of countries didn’t recognize you.”

Guaidó seen as weaker

Guaidó has been unable to translate international recognition as the legitimate leader of Venezuela and access to some of the country’s frozen funds into meaningful change on the ground in his country, and there are signs that his support among other opposition figures is waning.

In public statements over the past several months, leaders of major factions within the opposition have signaled a willingness to explore alternatives to the current interim government, which would result in Guaidó losing his position as interim president.

In comments to the McClatchy news service in October, a Biden administration official was quoted as saying, “The United States continues to recognize Juan Guaidó as the interim government of Venezuela,” but added, “If the Venezuelan opposition decides to do away with the interim government, it is their decision.”

The Biden administration excluded Venezuela from June’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.

Limits of the possible

All in all, it seems like a recipe for possible change in Washington’s approach to Caracas, though it remains unclear what that change might look like.

“There seems to be considerable frustration with the fact that earlier policy efforts have so far not succeeded,” Patrick Duddy, who served as U.S. ambassador to Venezuela from 2007 to 2010, told VOA.

Duddy said that it may be time to recognize that the goal of using sanctions to pressure the Maduro regime into allowing elections that it might lose, is not necessarily a realistic one.

“Among other factors, given that the United Nations has highlighted the very dire human rights situation [in Venezuela] and even suggested that there are those in the regime who are likely guilty of crimes against humanity, suggests that those elements of the regime are going to be very reluctant to give up the protections the come with being part of the government,” Duddy said.

A process, not a moment

Area, of the Atlantic Council, agreed. “I doubt that any election that will really contest Maduro’s power is viable in Venezuela.”

However, Area said that he believes there may be a way to persuade the Maduro regime to loosen some controls in a way that allows for broader representation without directly threatening the regime.

“The implicit goal is to rebuild capacity in civil society organizations, promote greater alignment among opposition parties, and strengthen their capacities and of the traditional Democratic political parties in preparation for the future,” he said.

Berg, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that he believes that the Biden administration has accepted the fact that any shift toward democracy in Venezuela is going to be, at best, incremental.

While Maduro is unlikely to agree to major changes, Berg said, it might be possible to persuade him to allow small reforms that would, nevertheless, improve the lives of Venezuelans.

“I think the administration sees this as a transition in the truest sense of that term, not as a discrete moment in time, where all of a sudden, you’re going to have a flash of light and there’s a democracy,” he said. “This is going to take a long time, and it’s going to be a process.”
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With Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso by his side, President Joe Biden said Monday the U.S. is looking to expand and strengthen the U.S. relationship with one of its staunchest allies in South America and a country that’s getting plenty of attention from China.

Lasso’s visit to Washington comes as his tiny nation is on the verge of completing a trade agreement with China, the strongest economic competitor of the United States. China this year surpassed the U.S. as Ecuador’s top trading partner on non-petroleum goods.

The already fragile economy in oil-exporting Ecuador was battered by the coronavirus outbreak. One of Lasso’s top priorities when he took office last year was to sign a free trade agreement with the United States, joining Colombia and Chile as the only other countries in South America to enjoy such privileged status.

But Biden, in the first two years of his presidency, has shied away from entering new trade pacts as he’s focused on first settling a U.S. economy that’s been battered by the pandemic, historic inflation and supply chain issues exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Today we’re going to keep building on the progress we’ve made,” Biden said at the start of an Oval Office meeting with Lasso. “Together, we’ve made historic strides.”

Lasso met with USAID administrator Samantha Power later Monday and was scheduled to hold talks with CIA Director William Burns, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and others before returning to Quito on Wednesday.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio, in a letter to the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation CEO Scott Nathan, urged the Biden administration to surge investment into Ecuador to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

“While the Biden administration continues to assert that the U.S. is the ‘partner of choice’ for Ecuador and other Latin American countries, governments and civil society in the region bemoan the lack of American-led, and other Western alternatives, to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) current and future investments,” Rubio wrote.

The White House, in a statement following the meeting, said the finance corporation was releasing a $13.5 million disbursement to support microfinance loans in Ecuador and said USAID intended to provide $5 million to aid Lasso’s initiative to address child malnutrition in his nation.

The alliance has become more important to the U.S. as much of South America has veered to the left, limiting the political space for cooperation with Washington, whose military and political interventions during the Cold War is recalled with bitterness across the region.

The U.S. Senate last week passed a bipartisan bill, the United States-Ecuador Partnership Act, which seeks to expand bilateral cooperation on the economy, security and environmental conservation. The effort is part of the annual defense bill that awaits Biden’s signature.

Among its provisions are a promise to transfer two excess U.S. Coast Guard cutters to help Ecuador patrol the protected waters around the Galapagos Islands, where China’s distant-water fishing fleet has become an unwelcome presence.

“Without a doubt, yes, we have been allies for decades now,” Lasso said. “And I am here to reaffirm that theory that we share among us as allies in our fight for democracy, peace and justice — not only in the region but also to support your vision throughout the world.”

While the Biden administration says it is invested in Ecuador’s success, Lasso confronts a long list of major challenges. Chief among them is the growing influence of criminal gangs — which have been behind recent prison riots — and an economy pegged to the U.S. dollar that has struggled to compete with cheaper production costs in neighboring countries.

Eric Farnsworth, a vice president of the Council of Americas in Washington, said the U.S. would be wise to provide meaningful assistance to Ecuador, which he described as a “strong democracy in a troubled neighborhood,” whether it’s from criminal gangs in Colombia or ongoing unrest in Peru.

“He needs help, and the U.S. is in a position to provide some,” said Farnsworth, who nonetheless thinks it is too early for the U.S. to commit to a free trade agreement. “Hopefully he will return to Quito with more than just praise.”

Lasso told reporters after meeting with Biden that they spent much of their roughly hour-long conversation talking about migration.

A U.S. court has ordered that immigration authorities can no longer quickly expel prospective asylum seekers. Title 42, as it’s called, has been used more than 2.5 million times to expel migrants since March 2020. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday issued an order temporarily blocking the lower court order to lift pandemic-era restrictions on asylum seekers.

Ecuadorians represent only a fraction of the more than 2.7 million migrants encountered on the southwest border in the last fiscal year, but their numbers have been steadily rising since the coronavirus pandemic.
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Jury selection in the seditious conspiracy case against former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and four others charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol began Monday after the judge denied defense attorneys’ last-minute bid to delay the trial over action by the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

Defense attorneys pushed to postpone jury selection in the high-profile case until after the new year, citing concerns that media coverage of the January 6 panel could taint the jury pool. A defense attorney told the judge it’s also impossible to know what evidence related to the Proud Boys might be released by the committee, which urged the Justice Department on Monday to bring criminal charges against former President Donald Trump and his allies.

“We don’t want to be picking the jury in this highly confusing and combustible environment,” attorney Norm Pattis, who is representing Proud Boy organizer Joseph Biggs, told the judge.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said they would push ahead, despite the committee’s work, and told defense attorneys he would remind jurors to avoid media coverage related to January 6. 

“The former president is not on trial here today,” the judge said before the first group of potential jurors were called into the courtroom.

Tarrio is perhaps the highest-profile defendant to face jurors yet in the attack that temporarily halted the certification of President Joe Biden’s win, left dozens of police officers injured and led to nearly 1,000 arrests. Tarrio, of Miami, and the others — Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Biggs — are charged with several other crimes in addition to sedition. 

They will face jurors just weeks after two leaders of another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, were convicted of seditious conspiracy in a major victory for the Justice Department. If convicted of sedition, the Proud Boys could face up to 20 years in prison. The trial is expected to last at least six weeks. 

Jury selection began hours before the January 6 House committee held its final public meeting and recommended criminal charges against Trump and associates who helped him launch a pressure campaign to try to overturn his 2020 election loss. 

Defense attorneys for the Proud Boys and other January 6 defendants have said there’s no way they can get an unbiased jury in Washington, where the federal court sits less than a mile from the Capitol. But judges have repeatedly denied requests to move the cases out of the nation’s capital, saying fair jurors can be found under the right questioning. 

The first potential juror questioned Monday said he once worked as an aide in the Supreme Court and has a brother who is a White House lawyer. The judge disqualified him. 

The judge also dismissed a woman who was working for Congressional Quarterly on January 6 and had several co-workers who were trapped in the building that day. The woman also said it would be difficult for her to set aside her opinions about the Proud Boys, whom she described as having a “delusional superhero complex.” 

Tarrio wasn’t in Washington on January 6 because he had been arrested two days earlier on charges that he vandalized a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December 2020. But prosecutors say he was the leader of a conspiracy to stop the transfer of power from Trump to Biden. 

Days before the riot, Tarrio posted on social media about “revolution,” according to court papers. Citing what they alleged was an encrypted message group created by Tarrio, authorities say members discussed attacking the Capitol. One message said, “Time to stack those bodies in front of Capitol Hill.” 

Prosecutors allege that even after his arrest, Tarrio kept command over the Proud Boys who attacked the Capitol and cheered on their actions from afar. As rioters stormed the building, he posted “don’t (expletive) leave” on social media, and later, “We did this …” 

Nordean, Pezzola, Biggs and Rehl were part of the first wave of rioters to push onto Capitol grounds and charge past police barricades toward the building, according to prosecutors. Pezzola used a riot shield he stole from a Capitol police officer to break a window, allowing the first rioters to enter the building, prosecutors allege. 

Nordean, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter president; Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described Proud Boys organizer; Rehl was president of the Proud Boys chapter in Philadelphia; and Pezzola was a Proud Boys member from Rochester, New York. 

Defense attorneys have denied that the Proud Boys leaders planned or led an attack on the Capitol. 

Tarrio’s lawyers say he didn’t instruct or encourage anyone to go into the Capitol or engage in violent or destructive behavior. Nordean’s attorney accused the Justice Department of selective prosecution and targeting him based on his political associations and beliefs. Rehl’s lawyer asked the judge to toss the indictment on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the case rested solely on Rehl’s political views and free speech. 

Last month’s guilty verdicts for Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs were the first seditious conspiracy trial convictions in decades. Jurors acquitted three other Oath Keeper defendants of seditious conspiracy, although they were convicted of other crimes. Four others associated with the Oath Keepers are also currently standing trial for seditious conspiracy. 
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More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of Twitter voted yes when the poll closed on Monday. 

There was no immediate announcement from Twitter, or Musk, about whether that would happen, though he said that he would abide by the results. 

Musk has clashed with some users on multiple fronts and on Sunday, he asked Twitter users to decide if he should stay in charge of the social media platform after acknowledging he made a mistake in launching new speech restrictions that banned mentions of rival social media websites. 

In yet another significant policy change, Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.” 

But that decision generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users. 

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet. 

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn. 

Twitter had said it would at least temporarily suspend accounts that include the banned websites in their profile — a practice so widespread it would have been difficult to enforce the restrictions on Twitter’s millions of users around the world. Not only links but attempts to bypass the ban by spelling out “instagram dot com” could have led to a suspension, the company said. 

A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier. 

Musk said Twitter will still suspend some accounts according to the policy but “only when that account’s (asterisk)primary(asterisk) purpose is promotion of competitors.” 

Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown rapidly in recent weeks as an alternative for Twitter users who are unhappy with Musk’s overhaul of Twitter since he bought the company for $44 billion in late October and began restoring accounts that ran afoul of the previous Twitter leadership’s rules against hateful conduct and other harms. 

Musk permanently banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then changed Twitter’s rules to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent. He then took aim at journalists who were writing about the jet-tracking account, which can still be found on other social media sites, alleging that they were broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.” 

He used that to justify Twitter’s moves last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover the social media platform and Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll by Musk. 

Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after posting a message on Twitter tagging Musk and requesting an interview. 

Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech. 

“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension. 

Musk’s promise to let users decide his future role at Twitter through an unscientific online survey appeared to come out of nowhere Sunday, though he had also promised in November that a reorganization was happening soon. 

Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company. 

Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer instead. Musk also said he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been more than a month since he said that. 

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.” 

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted. 
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Along the U.S. southern border, two cities — El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico — prepared Sunday for a surge of as many as 5,000 new migrants a day as pandemic-era immigration restrictions expire this week, setting in motion plans for emergency housing, food and other essentials.

On the Mexican side of the international border, only heaps of discarded clothes, shoes and backpacks remained Sunday morning on the banks of the Rio Grande River, where until a couple of days ago hundreds of people were lining up to turn themselves in to U.S. officials. One young man from Ecuador stood uncertain on the Mexican side; he asked two journalists if they knew anything about what would happen if he turned himself in without having a sponsor in the U.S., and then gingerly removed sneakers and socks and hopped across the low water.

On the American side, by a small fence guarded by several Border Patrol vehicles, he joined a line of a dozen people who stood waiting with no U.S. officials in sight.

El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego told The Associated Press on Sunday that the region, home to one of the busiest border crossings in the country, was coordinating housing and relocation efforts with groups and other cities, as well as calling on the state and federal government for humanitarian help. The area is preparing for an onslaught of new arrivals that could double their daily numbers once public health rule Title 42 ends on Wednesday.

The rule has been used to deter more than 2.5 million migrants from crossing since March 2020.

At a migrant shelter not far from the river in a poor Ciudad Juárez neighborhood, Carmen Aros, 31, knew little about U.S. policies. In fact, she said she’d heard the border might close on December 21.

She fled the cartel violence in the Mexican state of Zacatecas a month ago, right after her fifth daughter was born and her husband went missing. The Methodist pastor who runs the Buen Samaritano shelter put her on a list to be paroled into the United States and she waits every week to be called.

“They told me there was asylum in Juarez, but in truth, I didn’t know much,” she said on the bunk bed she shared with the girls. “We got here … and now let’s see if the government of the United States can resolve our case.”

At a vast shelter run by the Mexican government in a former Ciudad Juárez factory, dozens of migrants watched the World Cup final Sunday on two TVs while a visiting team of doctors from El Paso treated many who had come down with respiratory illness in the cold weather.

Constantly changing policies make it hard to plan, said Dylan Corbett, director of the Hope Border Institute, a Catholic organization helping migrants in both El Paso and Juarez. The group started the clinic two months ago.

“You have a lot of pent-up pain,” Corbett said. “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.” With government policies in disarray, “the majority of the work falls to faith communities to pick up the pieces and deal with the consequences.”

Just a couple blocks across the border, sleet fell in El Paso as about 80 huddled migrants ate tacos that volunteers grilled up. Temperatures in the region were set to drop below freezing this week.

“We’re going to keep giving them as much as we have,” said Veronica Castorena, who came out with her husband with tortillas and ground beef as well as blankets for those who will likely sleep on the streets.

Jeff Petion, the owner of a trucking school in town, said this was his second time coming with employees to help migrants in the streets. “They’re out here, they’re cold, they’re hungry, so we wanted to let them know they’re not alone.

But across the street from Petion, Kathy Countiss, a retiree, said she worries the new arrivals will get out of control in El Paso, draining resources and directing enforcement away from criminals to those claiming asylum.

On Saturday, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser issued an emergency declaration to access additional local and state resources for building shelters and other urgently needed aid.

Samaniego, the county judge, said the order came one day after El Paso officials sent Texas Gov. Greg Abbott a letter requesting humanitarian assistance for the region, adding that the request was for resources to help tend to and relocate the newly arriving migrants, not additional security forces.

Samaniego said he has received no response to the request and plans to issue a similar countywide emergency declaration specifying the kind of help the area needs if the city does not get state aid soon. He urged the state and federal governments to provide the additional money, adding they had a strategy in place but were short in financial, essential and volunteer resources.

El Paso officials have been coordinating with organizations to provide temporary housing for migrants while they are processed and given sponsors and relocate them to bigger cities where they can be flown or bused to their final destinations, Samaniego said. As of Wednesday, they will all join forces at a one-stop emergency command center, Samaniego said, similarly to their approach to the COVID-19 emergency.

Abbott, El Paso city officials and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

Abbott has committed billions of dollars to “Operation Lone Star,” an unprecedented border security effort that has included busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, as well as a massive presence of state troopers and National Guard along the Texas-Mexico border.

Additionally, the Republican Texas governor has pushed continued efforts to build former President Donald Trump’s wall using mostly private land along the border and crowdsourcing funds to help pay for it.

El Paso was the fifth-busiest of the Border Patrol’s nine sectors along the Mexico border as recently as March and suddenly became the most popular by far in October, jumping ahead of Del Rio, Texas, which itself had replaced Texas’ Rio Grande Valley as the busiest corridor at lightning-speed late last year. It is unclear why El Paso has become such a powerful magnet in recent months, drawing especially high numbers of migrants since September.

Recent illegal crossings in El Paso — at first largely dominated by Venezuelans and more recently by Nicaraguans — are reminiscent of a short period in 2019, when the westernmost reaches of Texas and eastern end of New Mexico were quickly overwhelmed with new arrivals from Cuba and Central America. El Paso had been a relatively sleepy area for illegal crossings for years.

Meanwhile, a group of about 300 migrants began walking northward Saturday night from an area near the Mexico-Guatemala border before being stopped by Mexican authorities. Some wanted to arrive on December 21, under the mistaken belief that the end of the measure would mean they could no longer request asylum.

Misinformation about U.S. immigration rules is often rife among migrants. The group was largely made up of Central Americans and Venezuelans who had crossed the southern border into Mexico and had waited in vain for transit or exit visas, migratory forms that might have allowed them to make it across Mexico to the U.S. border.

“We want to get to the United States as soon as possible, before they close the border, that’s what we’re worried about,” said Venezuelan migrant Erick Martínez.
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