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sanctions
US Deploys Warships to Venezuelan Coast, Raising Fears of Another 'Regime Change' War
"These aggressive policies seek to extend US dominance in Latin America, no matter the human cost," CodePink said.
Aug 21, 2025
The White House's announcement Wednesday that it had deployed three warships to the coast of Venezuela has raised fears among antiwar and human rights advocates of the US becoming embroiled in another potential "regime change" quagmire.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of being one of the world's largest traffickers of illegal narcotics and of leading the cocaine trafficking gang Cartel de los Soles.
In 2020, Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine into the US, with the first Trump administration promising a $15 million reward for his arrest. The Biden administration increased that bounty to $25 million before Trump, earlier this month, doubled it to $50 million.
Trump also expanded the litany of accusations against Maduro, alleging that he is the kingpin of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, an allegation that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says there is no evidence to support.
Even before Maduro's indictment, however, Trump had long sought to oust him from power. During his first term, he repeatedly suggested that the US should invade Venezuela to take Maduro out—an idea that his top aides rebuffed.
Trump instead dramatically escalated sanctions on Venezuela, which many studies have shown contributed to the nation's historic economic crisis. His former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explicitly acknowledged that the goal of these sanctions was to push the Venezuelan people to topple Maduro.
In 2023, following his first presidency, Trump lamented at a rally that the US had to purchase oil from Venezuela, saying that if he were in charge, "We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door."
The exact objective of Trump's destroyers, which are expected to arrive on the Venezuelan coast as soon as Sunday, remains unclear. But the Venezuelan government and others in the region have perceived Trump's threats as a serious provocation.
On Monday, Maduro said he would mobilize 4.5 million militia members following what he called "the renewal of extravagant, bizarre, and outlandish threats" from Trump. After the announcement of approaching warships, those militias began to be deployed throughout the country.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a harsh warning to Trump following the news.
"The gringos are mad if they think invading Venezuela will solve their problem," he said. "They are dragging Venezuela into a Syria-like situation, with the problem that they are dragging Colombia too."
The American antiwar group CodePink condemned the deployment of ships as a "reckless escalation" that "dangerously militarizes the Caribbean and brings our region closer to war."
The group argues that Venezuela's role in drug trafficking is being overblown to justify an invasion. They note that the US's own internal assessments of global drug trafficking have not identified Venezuela as a primary transit country. They also cite the UN's latest World Drug Report, which did not find Venezuela to be a central node of the drug trade.
The Washington Office on Latin America, a DC-based human rights group, has warned that a regime change war would likely be a catastrophe on par with the invasion of Iraq two decades prior.
"The 'victorious' US military would likely find itself governing an impoverished country with broken institutions, trying to hand over power to an opposition weakened by repression and exile, and probably facing an insurgency made up of regime diehards, criminal groups, and even Colombian guerrillas," they said. "There is no evidence that this approach would lead to a democratic transition in Venezuela."
"These aggressive policies seek to extend US dominance in Latin America, no matter the human cost," CodePink said. "The people of Venezuela, like the people of the United States, deserve peace, dignity, and sovereignty, not threats, blockades, and warships."
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As the US Detains and Deports, Venezuela Reunites Families
A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Aug 05, 2025
In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed a budget that commits at least $131 billion to expanding detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is the largest immigration enforcement package in modern U.S. history and one that most people are funding without knowing.
Public pension funds, university endowments, and municipal budgets are deeply invested in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) machinery. If you pay into a retirement fund, attend a university, or live in a major city, your money might be helping detain someone. Your tax dollars already are.
The plan triples ICE’s funding, revives the failed border wall project, builds new jails for families, and allocates $10 billion in unregulated funds to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At the same time, up to 17 million people risk losing healthcare and millions of children face losing access to school meals.
These priorities are not accidental. They reflect a political strategy that treats migration as a threat to be neutralized rather than a consequence of U.S. policy. This budget doesn’t just expand infrastructure, it expands a racialized system of surveillance, incarceration, and profit, while shrinking legal protection, due process, and public oversight.
Here’s what the new immigration budget includes:
- $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation—a threefold increase;
- $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers, including for children and families;
- $46.6 billion for border wall construction, which is more than triple what U.S. President Donald Trump spent in his first term;
- $10 billion in unregulated DHS funding to “safeguard the border” without oversight;
- A daily detention capacity of 116,000 human beings, enough to fill a stadium with mothers, students, toddlers, and elders or to disappear the entire population of Lansing, Michigan or Athens, Georgia; and
- An 800 person limit on the number of immigration judges, worsening already record-breaking court backlogs and delaying due process for millions.
ICE Is Everywhere
ICE doesn’t operate alone. It dances with Palantir’s algorithms. It swallows data from school and Department of Motor Vehicles records. It whispers to local cops in sanctuary cities. It hides in contracts signed by universities that claim to care about inclusion. It is public and private, visible and invisible, and always expanding.
The border doesn’t stop at the border.
ICE shares tech, tactics, and training with local police across the U.S., especially in Black and Brown communities. The same algorithms used to deport migrants are used to lock up teenagers in Chicago, LA, and New York. The war economy is domestic, too.
Migration Is Not a Crisis; U.S. Policy Is
The people being detained and deported are not a crisis. They are the result of one. U.S. foreign policy, through sanctions, coups, climate extraction, and economic warfare, has destabilized entire regions and then criminalized those who flee.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Venezuela.
Years of U.S. sanctions have severely constrained Venezuela’s economy and pushed millions to migrate. A recent study in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral economic sanctions lead to an estimated 564,000 deaths every year, mostly among children under five. The researchers concluded that sanctions are a form of economic warfare with deadly consequences, often as destructive as armed conflict. Venezuela is among the countries most severely affected.
A Stark Contrast: Venezuela’s Efforts to Reunite Families
Despite being locked out of international markets, denied access to its own reserves, and targeted by ongoing U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan government has prioritized reuniting families separated by deportation. Flights have been organized to return Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. and neighboring countries. Deportees are met with medical care, housing support, and assistance. There are no billion-dollar detention centers. No ankle monitors. No private contractors. Just the political decision to bring people home with dignity.
This reflects a deeper difference. The United States continues to expand a war economy, one that profits from incarceration, surveillance, and militarized borders. Corporations like Palantir, CoreCivic, and GEO Group are major beneficiaries of immigration funding, alongside weapons manufacturers and data firms. In contrast, Venezuela’s response, under siege, has been to build on a peace economy rooted in social programs, community organization, and everyday resilience.
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee.
Much of that work is led by women.
In Venezuela, Madres Víctimas del Fascismo have been organizing alongside the government to locate, support, and repatriate their children, many of whom were detained in the U.S. or in Latin American countries. These mothers have worked with consular authorities, spoken in public forums, and demanded state action to bring their families back together. Through their pressure, and the government’s cooperation, some have already seen their children return home.
This is what a peace economy looks like, one built on social programs, community organization, and state-supported reunification.
The Violence of the Border Enforcement Is the Violence of the Empire
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee. Venezuela knows this intimately. Its economy has been blocked, its institutions targeted, and its people criminalized the moment they cross a border. And yet it was Venezuela that welcomed deported migrants with food, medicine, and housing; they were greeted with care. A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Who Is Complicit?
This system doesn’t operate in just one region. It’s not limited to Texas or Arizona. It’s embedded across the country, in contracts, databases, and quiet forms of cooperation.
Schools often share data, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Universities collaborate with DHS through software licensing and research grants. Investors, including public pension funds and university endowments, hold shares in GEO Group, Palantir, and other deportation profiteers.
The U.S. has made its priorities clear. It is willing to spend more to detain migrants than to house the hundreds of thousands living unhoused on the streets of its cities. It is expanding detention while limiting legal avenues for relief. It is responding to the consequences of its foreign policy with policing not accountability.
It’s not enough to say “Abolish ICE.” We must hold accountable every institution that feeds its machinery, from schools that share data, to universities that license surveillance tech, to investors profiting from migrant detention.
Migration is not a crime. U.S. sanctions are.
- End institutional cooperation with ICE
- Demand divestment from companies profiting off detention
- Organize against U.S. sanctions and intervention
The war economy is everywhere. So the resistance must be, too.
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Sanctions Against Israel Are Long Overdue
If Netanyahu’s war machine is not stopped, the annihilation of the Palestinian people will continue, major parts of the Gaza Strip will be annexed with a plan for Jewish resettlement, and the annexation of the West Bank will be finalized.
Aug 02, 2025
The use of sanctions to coerce states to change policy and behavior has a long history, dating back to antiquity. In 432 BC, the Athenian statesman Pericles issued the “Megarian Decree,” which banned merchants of Megara from accessing harbors and marketplaces in the Athenian empire. In the modern times, economic sanctions took primarily the form of naval blockades. The first naval blockade is believed to have been “declared by the Dutch in 1584.” In the 19th century, pacific blockades became a common strategy of powerful European states, with the aim being to weaken the economy of the enemy. In the early 20th century, the League of Nations used sanctions to compel aggressors to abandon the resort to arms, as it did in the case of Italy in order to discontinue that country’s aggression against Ethiopia.
However, since the end of World War II, it has been primarily the United States that has been resorting to sanctions in order to punish nations or non-state actors for pursuing policies or engaging in actions that pose a challenge to its guest for global dominance. The U.S. embargo against Cuba, which has endured for over 60 years and touches every aspect of Cuban life, stands out as the longest sanctions regime in modern history even though it is illegal and has been denounced by the United Nations General Assembly over 30 times. Only Israel sides with the U.S. for the continuation of the economic, commercial, and financial embargo on Cuba.
Because of its unique relationship with the global hegemon, Israel is one country that has escaped comprehensive sanctions against it in spite of what Amnesty International has called its “ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession,” coupled with large-scale massacres and accusations of being an apartheid state that is now committing genocidal acts in Gaza. The time, however, has come for the international community to take strong measures against the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and impose “crippling sanctions” on the Israeli economy and thus on its war machine.
Such course of action is long overdue, but it is gaining traction across the globe, even inside Israel. The Hague Group, a group of nations from the Global South, has not only decried Israel’s actions in Gaza but called on all states on July 16 following a two-day summit in Bogotá, which brought together representatives from over 30 states, to impose a series of sanctions against Israel in order to stop the genocide and apartheid. Brazil has already moved forward with imposing forceful sanctions against Israel, which include exports of military material. Brazil’s foreign minister delivered a powerful speech at a high-level United Nations conference on Palestine on July 28 in which he said that his country “will not tolerate Israeli impunity.” High-profile Israeli figures have also urged “crippling sanctions” on Israel over its starvation-driven campaign in Gaza.
The tide is indeed turning. The West’s shameful silence on Gaza for the past 21 or so months is coming to an end.
Very belatedly, but Europe is also losing patience with Israel. Several European countries, which include Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, and lately Sweden, are calling for the suspension of the E.U.-Israel Association Agreement in order to stop the genocide. More than 80 British Members of Parliament and Lords have issued a call for the U.K. government to impose widespread sanctions on Israel. Fifty-eight former ambassadors of the European Union have lambasted the E.U. for its “complicity” over its silence on Israeli genocide and urged all European leaders and government to take immediate measures to end “atrocity crimes against the Palestinian people—above all in Gaza, but also in the occupied West Bank.”
Indeed, in their letter, the 58 former E.U. envoys went to great lengths not only to highlight Israel’s crimes in Gaza but also to underscore the vile plan of the far-right Israeli government for annexation of the occupied West Bank. They wrote:
…Meanwhile, in the West Bank, violent Israeli settlers, with full protection by the Israeli military, have waged a campaign of terror against Palestinian communities. Homes are torched, inhabitants are murdered, families expelled, water sources poisoned, herding animals stolen, olive groves destroyed, and land annexed in violation of international law. The perpetrators who act with impunity are armed and encouraged by state officials. These settlers are not rogue actors—they are the front-line agents of a government-driven agenda to annex and ethnically cleanse Palestinian land.
The tide is indeed turning. The West’s shameful silence on Gaza for the past 21 or so months is coming to an end. In a first, the European Commission recommended the suspension of Israel’s access to the E.U.’s research and innovation fund over the apocalyptic situation in Gaza, but Germany and Italy blocked the proposal.
In the U.S., of course, the situation remains very dismal. The Trump administration is sanctioning individuals who criticize Israel and call for economic sanctions against its key ally, such as Francesca Paola Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, and scolds those European governments that are preparing to recognize a Palestinian state. And the Senate has just rejected a resolution introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block arms sales to Israel over its destruction of Gaza. Yet, a record number of Democrats voted in support of Sander’s resolution to block U.S. military sales to Israel, while polls show that U.S. public support for Israel’s actions in Gaza has dropped to a new low.
Pending on one’s philosophical perspective on the fundamental nature of reality, the situation on starving and besieged Gaza with regard to the urgent need of imposing “crippling sanctions” on Israel, which Netanyahu and his far-right government has turned into an autocracy, a global pariah, and an outright rogue state, is either a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty. Regardless, the point is that if Netanyahu’s war machine is not stopped, the annihilation of the Palestinian people will continue, major parts of the Gaza Strip will be annexed with a plan for Jewish resettlement, and the annexation of the West Bank will be finalized.
“Denial” about what is happening in Gaza may be “legitimate” in Israel, as the iconic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently put it, but should be seen as a totally intolerable situation for every government across the globe that professes to respect human rights and claims not to tolerate barbarity in our own age, even though we know fully well that what guides state policies are rarely moral considerations. Putting an end to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank is first and foremost about stopping Israeli killings of Palestinians but is also about restoring human dignity and human decency for our entire species.
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