On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in a 2.5-hour operation that removed him from power after more than a decade in office.1 The operation’s migration consequences, both displacement from Venezuela and the potential for return, immediately became central to its political aftermath. Shortly after the strikes, Colombia deployed military and humanitarian forces along its border with Venezuela and activated 17 emergency centers in anticipation of a mass refugee influx. Trinidad and Tobago cordoned key areas of Port of Spain.4 Guyana’s president announced full security mobilization. The assumption driving these responses was that U.S. military action in Venezuela would generate a new wave of displacement on top of the 7.9 million Venezuelans already abroad. This assumption was operationally reasonable, historically informed, and shared by governments across the region. Nevertheless, a mass refugee wave did not materialize. Simultaneously, the Trump administration moved in the opposite direction. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem declared on January 4 that “Venezuela today is more free than it was yesterday” and suggested that Venezuelans whose Temporary Protected Status had been terminated could now return. Senior officials echoed the claim that Maduro’s removal made the country safe, reinforcing the administration’s position that protections were no longer justified. This countervailing assumption, that simply capturing Maduro would reverse the migration calculus for nearly eight million displaced people, has so far also proven to be erroneous. In the months since, no public estimate has been made of how many civilians the operation itself had displaced. No empirical test has been applied to determine whether cross-border migration flows had responded to the strikes in either direction, leaving policymakers to make future decisions on issues like border mobilizations, TPS terminations, and repatriation messaging on the basis of priors rather than data.
