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Trump’s Venezuela incursion has nothing to do with its freedom | Judith Levine

Whatever else the US attack on Venezuela is ostensibly about – oil, drugs, communism – it’s not about the freedom of the Venezuelan people.

If Trump cared about that, he would not have lifted the temporary protective status of the roughly 600,000 Venezuelan refugees in the US, the very people fleeing the tyranny and economic instability he is now supposedly liberating them from.

He would not have deported 238 Venezuelan nationals – only six of whom had been convicted of violent crimes and none of whose names were on international lists of 1,400 suspected Venezuelan gang members – to El Salvador’s Cecot torture chambers. If he cared about Venezuelans’ – or anyone else’s – safety, he would not have imposed heightened restrictions or total bans on travelers from 39 countries, 24 of which Freedom House categorizes as “not free”. These include Venezuela and Iran, whose oppressed people Trump is threatening to rescue by military force next.

What if any of those Venezuelans object to the takeover of their country? Resistance is inevitable, experts say, whether by paramilitaries, disgruntled but not defeated Maduro supporters, or puppets of China, Iran or Russia. Will the colonial viceroys crack down?

Amnesty International released a statement on Saturday expressing concern about potential “escalation of human rights violations … stemming either from additional US operations or from the Venezuelan government’s responses to the US attacks”. Trump says he’s “not afraid” to deploy troops on the ground.

The opposition leader María Corina Machado is ready to return from exile and move directly to a new election, which she says she’d win handily. But Trump doesn’t want an election, and he doesn’t want Machado. Sources told the Washington Post he is still peeved that she failed to turn down the 2025 Nobel peace prize he wanted – even though she says she’d gladly share it now.

But beyond petty grudges, Trump and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, have reason to prefer Delcy Rodríguez, vice-president to Nicolás Maduro, to a democratically elected leader. Despite some belligerent talk, Rodríguez is “willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again”, the US president said. And if she doesn’t, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”, he told the Atlantic. In other words, she can be coerced for the oil the US wants to extract from her country.

Equally important, a new president elected quickly, freely and fairly in Caracas would eliminate the pretext for maintaining control of the country while stealing its oil: that is, the return of democracy to the Venezuelan people.

But you don’t have to predict Venezuela’s future to give the lie to Trump’s professed liberatory ideals. For proof that Trump couldn’t care less about freedom, Americans need look no further than their own front yard.

An efficient method would be to examine Maduro’s violations of political and human rights – and then Trump’s. In its 2024 country report, Amnesty International highlighted the Venezuelan government’s repression of protest, attempts to obstruct independent media and blockage of information about the environment; its criminalization of abortion and failure to protect LGBTQ+ rights; widespread poverty and lack of access to food and healthcare.

The report cited excessive use of force, arbitrary and warrantless arrests of political opponents, human rights defenders and journalists, and the detention of children. Disappearances lasted days, during which detainees’ families “were denied information about their whereabouts”. The UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination “denounced the administrative detention of refugees and migrants … pending deportation without access to legal assistance or a procedure to access international protection”, Amnesty’s report said. Conditions of detention deteriorated; torture persisted.

And “impunity prevailed for human rights violations”.

The victims of these violations are not precisely the same in the two countries; nor is the magnitude of violence. But the parallels are striking: arbitrary arrests, disappearances, inhuman conditions in detention; bans on abortion and transgender care; poverty and inadequate food and healthcare.

Trump has not yet imprisoned his political enemies, but US attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI chief Kash Patel are working on it. Human rights defenders are not in jail, but under the guise of combatting antisemitism, students have been abducted, and the US Department of State and the treasury are seeking to destroy non-profits that provide humanitarian aid to Palestine.

The Department of Homeland Security has not shipped immigrants to extermination camps. But as of October, 20 people had died in its custody – the deadliest year since 2005 – and asylees are being deported to their own or third countries where they risk imprisonment, torture or death.

The US does not have a policy of extrajudicial killings, as Maduro appeared to. But presaging the raid on Venezuela, the US military summary executed at least 95 purported smugglers in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. At home, the Trace, which tracks gun violence, documents 14 shootings by ICE as of 7 January, including four people observing or documenting raids and five driving away from traffic stops or evading agents. On Wednesday in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good, 37, was fatally shot in her car, one of four fatalities caused by immigration agents’ bullets.

Then there are the legal killings. After Trump’s first-day executive order “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Safety”, the states executed 47 death row inmates in 2025 – “the greatest frenzy of capital punishment bloodletting in the US since 2009”, said the Guardian.

A war with Venezuela – or Colombia, Iran or Greenland – could provide the state of emergency Trump seems to be hankering for. Such a declaration could enable the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, suspending civil liberties and intensifying political repression, or harshen and accelerate mass deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. The scant oversight the executive branch now receives would virtually evaporate.

The only freedom Trump cares about is his own, to exert his megalomania and enrich himself and his cronies. He will stop at nothing to advance these liberties, including kidnap, murder, and the decimation of the global legal order that is already struggling to protect peace, democracy, human rights and the planet.