The 2025 National Security Strategy frames migration from Latin America as a national security threat. The framing is not wrong. Criminal organizations do exploit migration routes, profit from smuggling networks, and use migration flows as operational cover. These are documented realities. But the securitization of migration without understanding its underlying drivers produces policies that address symptoms rather than causes, and often generate blowback that makes the underlying security environment worse.
The scale of the problem is not abstract. By December 2025, more than 7.9 million Venezuelans had fled their country since 2014, representing nearly 23% of the pre-crisis population. This is the largest displacement crisis in Latin American history and the second-largest refugee situation globally after Syria. Of those 7.9 million, approximately 6.9 million remained in Latin America and the Caribbean, with Colombia hosting nearly 3 million alone. These are not primarily people choosing to migrate. They are people who calculated that staying was more dangerous than leaving.
“In Colombia, we learned that military pressure alone never solved displacement. People move when they are more afraid of staying than of moving. The logic applies across the hemisphere. You cannot shoot your way to reduced migration.”
The Trump administration’s border enforcement strategy produced a measurable short-term result. Irregular crossings through the Darien Gap collapsed by 98% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. But this did not reduce the number of people attempting to move. It redirected them toward more dangerous clandestine routes, exposed them to higher rates of trafficking and extortion, and pushed thousands of stranded migrants to begin moving back southward through unsafe maritime corridors. Route reduction is not the same as need reduction. The drivers that produce displacement remained entirely intact.
What actually drives migration: The primary drivers of migration from Central America and Venezuela are institutional failure, criminal violence, economic collapse, and in some cases climate disruption of agricultural livelihoods. Venezuela’s economy contracted by more than 75% in real GDP terms during the Maduro years. Basic services, healthcare, food security, and rule of law collapsed over the same period. The criminal organizations that profit from migration flows are a secondary layer. They exploit conditions they did not create. A strategy focused exclusively on interdicting the secondary layer while leaving the primary drivers intact will produce the same result every time: temporary disruption followed by adaptation.
The Colombia parallel: Colombia experienced its own massive internal displacement crisis during the height of the FARC conflict, with millions of internally displaced persons at the peak. Military pressure contributed to reducing that displacement, but the reduction only became durable when it was combined with institutional capacity building, access to land and livelihoods for returning populations, and sustained investment in governance in formerly conflict-affected territories. The security gains of Plan Colombia were not consolidated by military pressure alone. They were consolidated by the institutional follow-through that came after. Migration from Venezuela and Central America will follow the same logic.
The post-Maduro variable: The capture of Maduro in January 2026 introduced a new dynamic. With Delcy Rodriguez as acting president and the regime apparatus still largely intact, the conditions that produced 7.9 million displaced Venezuelans have not fundamentally changed. The uncertainty surrounding Venezuela’s political transition may actually accelerate short-term displacement as populations assess whether conditions will improve or deteriorate further. The 2025-2026 Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan for Venezuela was only 34% funded in 2024. If instability deepens, that funding gap will become a security gap as well, as under-resourced host countries face renewed pressure and criminal networks fill the governance vacuum.
This is not an argument against border security. It is an argument that border security alone is insufficient and historically has never been sufficient. The strategy that works is the one that makes staying more viable than leaving. That strategy requires sustained bilateral engagement, institutional investment, and the kind of practitioner-level understanding of local governance, criminal networks, and displacement dynamics that cannot be replicated from a policy memo or a strike package.
