What Did Venezuela Ever Do To The US? Lots! (Gangs, Drugs, Migration, Oil Theft, And More.)

Director’s note: Our managing editor James Fulford has been writing about the national question for over twenty years at VDARE.com. After the political persecution of the VDARE Foundation and now the Brimelow family personally by New York Attorney General Letitia James (you can support them here), he was laid off and we count ourselves very lucky to be in a position (thanks to you) to be able to bring him on board here to lend his immigration expertise to the institute. However, our policy niche provides an outlet for only a fraction of Fulford wit and wisdom. He is a national treasure, and we hope you’ll subscribe to his personal Substack here from which this was republished with additions and where you can find everything else from the Fulford File including some of my favorites like The Many Wars on Halloween.

If you’re on Twitter at all, you’ve been reading a lot about a white woman who got shot in Minneapolis trying to run over an ICE agent. You may not even have noticed that she’s not the only one to try this. When Border Patrol agents went to arrest Venezuelan illegal immigrant and Tren de Aragua gang member Luis David Nino-Moncada, he tried to run them over—and was also shot, as was the woman with him, also Tren de Aragua gang associate.

DHS identifies 2 shot by federal agents in Portland

DHS released this report:

DHS Provides Update on U.S. Border Patrol in Portland Who Attempted to Arrest Tren de Aragua Gang Associate and Suspected Member

Release Date: January 9, 2026

DHS law enforcement is facing an unprecedented 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks

PORTLAND, Ore. – Yesterday, two suspected Tren de Aragua gang associates—let loose on American streets by Joe Biden—weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol in Portland. The agent took immediate action to defend himself and others, shooting them.

After fleeing, the suspects drove nearly five miles to an apartment complex and called emergency medical services. They were transported to separate hospitals. Luis David Nino-Moncada sustained an injury to the arm while Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest. Nino-Moncada is now in FBI custody. These individuals are not married.

It’s amazing that though both these people are citizens of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and known to be in the US illegally, a report from Vancouver, Canada, due north of Portland describes them this way: U.S. border patrol shoots Portland couple amid tensions with ICE, January 9, 2026.

Those two are an example of what the US has been receiving from said Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, especially during the Biden Administration, and go a long way towards explaining what Trump just did to Nicolás Maduro, as I explain below.

Donald Trump’s brilliant and successful raid on Caracas that captured Maduro—who had an American arrest warrant out for him, with a $50 million dollar reward—has produced a number of bad takes on Twitter, including this one, by liberal lawyer Dilan Esper:

His argument is that while Maduro was bad for Venezuelans he wasn’t that bad for American, so Americans didn’t need to go get Maduro just because he was a dictator.

This is true—calling the Iraq War “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was a bad idea. Realistic foreign policy doesn’t mean trying to turn enemy countries into free countries: they might freely vote to continue being enemies. It means making enemy countries stop being enemies.

The first reason Venezuela is an enemy: they’ve been actually invading and occupying the US.

Earlier, here on White Papers, Director Cyan Quinn wrote

The United States maintains the highest Venezuelan migrant population of any Western nation with a legal population of over 750,000 and illegal population estimated to be 650,000. They also accounted for another approximately 261,000 encounters at the border in 2024, a figure second only to Mexicans.

See

She’s saying what President Trump is also saying: that non-Maduro-run Venezuela will allow Venezuelans to remigrate, returning to their native land.

Here’s what Trump said:

“We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. And that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country—it’s their homeland.”

This is the same as what happened when Syria’s Assad stopped being dictator people went home, or remigrated, as we like to say.

Al Jazeera has an animation that I can’t embed showing the ebb and flow here, but as of December 8, 2025, “One year after al-Assad’s fall, nearly 1.8 million displaced Syrians and 780,000 refugees have returned home.”

Venezuelans aren’t Syrians, but they do have gangs, like the infamous Tren de Aragua, which was taking over apartment blocks in American cities—see my own article, also here on White Papers:

That was about “Immigrant Crime Denial” and how dare Trump or J D Vance complain about a Venezuelan gang acting like an occupying army in American cities:

What else did Venezuela do? Well, there’s all the drugs they export to the US—and this is something that Maduro is responsible for, and why there was a bounty on his head placed there by Joe Biden (or someone in his Administration.)

The first Trump administration put a $15M bounty on Maduro (on drug trafficking and weapons charges), Biden raised it first to $25M then to $50M, but of course Trump just sent Delta to get Maduro—which as Rubio pointed out, saved the cost of the cash payout.

'I Guess We Save $50 Million…': Rubio Jokes About Bounty On Maduro After Ousting

Venezuela has been a major drug source for years:

Then there’s the stolen oil—the 1976 appropriation of American oil companies in Venezuela—which despite all the stories just now saying things like this:

The Theft That Never Was: Inside Venezuela’s 1976 Oil Takeover

Stephen Miller said that the US developed the Venezuelan oil industry only to see it stolen and weaponized against them. This is what really happened

Marcus Golding, Caracas ,Chronicles, December 26, 2025

the US absolutely did develop the Venezuelan oil industry only to see it “stolen and weaponized against them.”

Miller’s actual quote is much stronger than that:

American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.

And of course, the nationalization meant that oil production—of oil that everyone in the world needs, and is willing to pay for—was reduced by two-thirds.

If Venezuela started taking its Navy out on the high seas and grabbing oil tankers, everyone would expect the US Navy to do something—maybe the era of allowing rogue governments to just steal whole companies from Americans should be left in the past.

James Fulford has been writing about the national question for over 20 years, mostly for VDARE.com, more recently for WhitePapers, and on his own Substack The Fulford File—paid subscribers wanted!.