By Sam Vigersky* – Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
As prospects for U.S. intervention in Venezuela grow, an already dire humanitarian landscape risks unraveling further, raising urgent questions about whether the military options reportedly under review at the White House account for the human toll that could follow.
While Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine dominate humanitarian headlines, the world’s largest refugee and migrant crisis is unfolding far closer to the United States. In Venezuela—once the richest country in Latin America—nearly eight million people have fled a worsening crisis in the past decade, a mass exodus rivaling Syria’s. Those who remain face challenges more commonly seen in war zones: collapsing health systems, economic crisis, and rampant hunger, with 40 percent of the population experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity.
In recent weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has grown impatient with the status quo, halting envoy Richard Grenell’s diplomatic negotiations over oil and gold concessions, authorizing covert CIA operations, and launching a seventh lethal strike on an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean Sea.
The United States’ endgame has not been articulated. Reports suggest the administration has mapped out multiple military strategies to force Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power. Trump has only fanned speculation, telling reporters on October 15 that he is considering U.S. strikes inside Venezuela. Maduro, for his part, announced the mobilization of troops to the Caribbean coast and preparations to declare a state of emergency “should Venezuela be attacked”—plans that reportedly include activating trained community militias.
The best-case scenario—a peaceful political transition that unlocks humanitarian access and sparks Venezuela’s long-term economic recovery—remains possible. The surprising return of one million refugees to Syria in the nine months after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime shows how quickly, and how many, people will come home under the right conditions.
But the ghosts of Iraq and Libya remind us how easily escalation with a petrostate can spiral into chaos. A prolonged armed conflict could plunge Venezuela into a complex emergency with no clear off-ramp. Experts warn that these new shocks would trigger another wave of population displacement and outward migration, sending millions more across borders and straining long-fatigued neighbors.
Meanwhile, aid organizations are already walking a high wire with no safety net. The Trump administration slashed funding for Venezuela from $94.5 million in 2024 to $2.2 million in 2025, forcing UN agencies like the World Food Program to cut operations in half. This reduction in funding, coupled with a treacherous domestic environment where aid workers fear government reprisals and arbitrary detention, has forced several NGOs to shutter operations altogether.
If the United States chooses escalation, it must also accept responsibility for the lives upended by it. It is incumbent upon the White House, therefore, to plan for those humanitarian consequences.
A decade of humanitarian crisis
Once so flush with oil that it was dubbed “the jewel of Latin America,” Venezuela now ranks among the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The country’s economic implosion ranks as the largest peacetime economic collapse recorded between 1970 and 2015—a staggering contraction fueled by government mismanagement, corruption, and hyperinflation. And conditions have only eroded further.
The human toll of the situation began to climb in 2015. As food, electricity, and medicine became scarce, the government denied the existence of a crisis, blocking aid and silencing those who said otherwise. With antibiotics impossible to secure, even minor cuts could cause deadly consequences, forcing families to choose between putting food on the table and affording the medicine they need. By March 2018, the NGO Caritas reported that one in six children under age five suffered from acute malnutrition.
For years, the United Nations couldn’t even acknowledge the scale of the disaster. International protocol requires the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to obtain government signoff to issue a humanitarian appeal, which Maduro refused to give. It was not until 2019 that the United Nations launched its first coordinated Humanitarian Response Plan [PDF] for Venezuela, allowing for incremental progress. A separate Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP) was also established to support neighboring states absorbing millions of Venezuelan refugees. By 2021, the World Food Program was allowed to operate inside the country, launching programs with the goal of feeding 1.5 million schoolchildren.
The U.S. response, then and now
This is not the first time that the United States has contended with an emergency in Venezuela. In 2019, a similar flash point erupted after the 2018 National Assembly elections, which elevated opposition leader Juan Guaidó to interim president. Hoping to rally a popular uprising behind Guaidó to oust Maduro, the first Trump administration coordinated a military airlift of humanitarian aid to the city of Cúcuta, Colombia, on the Venezuelan border. Maduro, accusing Trump of weaponizing aid, responded by blocking bridges, preventing aid from crossing the border.
The standoff veered into spectacle when billionaire Richard Branson decided to host a music festival in Cúcuta in support of the United States’ aid efforts. Maduro responded in kind, staging his own rival concert (albeit with less star power) to mobilize aid for Colombians. Six years later, Trump’s approach to Venezuela’s crisis has shifted—at least from a humanitarian perspective. Between fiscal years 2017 and 2024, the United States provided more than $3.5 billion in humanitarian aid to Venezuela and its neighbors.
Today, Washington has largely turned the other way. Perhaps the clearest example is the now critically underfunded RMRP; in 2025, the United States reduced its support from $383 million to just $44 million, leaving the plan only 8 percent funded.
What Trump’s humanitarian roadmap should include
Working without the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—and with a State Department hollowed out of its refugee experts—the White House could soon be running a real-time stress test of a national security system it has spent months shrinking. Having discarded traditional instruments of foreign assistance over the last nine months, what could a Trump humanitarian playbook for Venezuela include in the days to come?
First, an end to aid worker-targeting and the promotion of humanitarian access. U.S. funding cuts have weakened traditional leverage points, but an expanded military presence in the Caribbean Sea could help offset the deficit. That influence should be used to restart dialogue to free wrongfully detained aid workers from humanitarian organizations, including Humanity & Inclusion and the Danish Refugee Council, as well as to extract guarantees from Caracas that attacks on local NGOs cease and bureaucratic impediments ease. Monitored closely, this can translate into a confidence-building measure for future de-escalation.
Second, the Treasury Department should address misunderstandings on sanctions and aid. Humanitarian programs operating in Venezuela are technically exempt from U.S. sanctions through a general license. In practice, however, that license is uneven when interpreted toward local and international NGOs. Banks, wary of crossing the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), often fail to release funds, crippling operations in rural and Indigenous communities where need is highest and the presence of international organizations is lowest. OFAC should be prepared to engage NGOs, document their chokepoints, and then convene banks to clearly explain U.S. policy.
Third, prepare long-sidelined financing for a humanitarian surge. Venezuela is believed to have an estimated $3.2 billion in frozen assets abroad, by far the single most consequential nonmilitary instrument that the United States holds. These funds were supposed to anchor the 2022 Social Agreement between the Maduro government and the opposition Unitary Platform coalition to gradually channel unfrozen funds into a UN-managed Social Protection Fund for humanitarian and development programs.
That plan stalled when the Biden administration failed to guarantee that the fund could exist in the United States without being seized by creditors with claims to Venezuelan debt—halting UN willingness to manage the program. To mitigate a repeat, the Treasury Department should catalogue where these funds are located, confirm their total value, and outline mechanisms for rapidly transferring them into a new UN multi-donor trust fund with guaranteed protection from creditors.
Fourth, anticipate Colombia’s role and response to a new inflection point. Any successful aid surge will run through the border hub Cúcuta, but this time around it will require more diplomacy than theatrics. U.S. relations with Colombian President Gustavo Petro are frayed, and Colombia’s own humanitarian situation is the worst it’s been in eight years. Coupled with the fact that USAID assistance to Colombia has been slashed—from $134 million in 2024 to just $9 million in 2025—the path to meaningful partnership is rocky at best.
Trump needs to consider not only how to partner with Petro but also how outward migration into Colombia could reshape the politics of its forthcoming election. Given the breadcrumbs of U.S. assistance remaining on the table, it’s doubtful Petro feels threatened by Trump’s October 19 halting of aid to Colombia, but there should be broader concern for the trajectory of this relationship.
Finally, continue engagement with the United Nations. The United Nations remains the only actor capable of coordinating food, medicine, refugees, and logistics at scale for a Venezuela response. At the same time, the United Nations and its NGO partners would be wise to brace for a new Trump aid paradigm, too. Between U.S. funding cuts and the growing role of private organizations staffed by non-humanitarians like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the status quo is under mounting threat. The United Nations and its humanitarian leadership council, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, would be wise to respond to these challenges by ensuring a unified, agile, and assertive footing—lest they foreshadow a more permanent rebalancing of power with the United Nations relegated to supporting roles.
*Sam Vigersky is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has more than two decades of experience as a humanitarian practitioner and policymaker.