The removal of Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela and the sudden deeper involvement of the U.S. government and other private interests in future Venezuelan affairs could well have significant positive implications for our national security. While the criminal indictment of Maduro and his partners focused on charges related to his involvement in facilitating and profiting from large scale “ton-level” drug trafficking and distribution, Maduro and his associates have other ties that are of concern to the United States — including a longstanding partnership with the Lebanese Islamist terror group Hezbollah. Regime change in Venezuela potentially could help diminish the threat from this organization if they no longer have protection and support from within the Venezuelan government.
Until recently, Hezbollah was considered one of the most powerful non-state actors in the Middle East, but long dependent on the government of Iran for financial support of its activities. Then, decades ago, Hezbollah leadership branched out into Latin America, presumably to diversify revenue sources through involvement in drug trafficking and other crimes, and to establish a launching pad for attacks on Israeli, Jewish, and U.S. targets in the Western hemisphere. Its success in integrating itself into the criminal cartel business has made it one of the most financially resilient terrorist organizations in the world, according to experts.
Hezbollah achieved this prosperity in large part by building an extensive network of operatives and associates within the large Lebanese diaspora in Venezuela who assist in raising funds and partnering in business ventures, within and outside of the Venezuelan government and the legal economy. This network has been actively supported by individuals at the top of the Venezuelan government, beginning under the regime of Hugo Chavez in the early 2000s and continuing under the Maduro regime. Today, Venezuela is considered “a central hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism”.
This criminal activity includes drug and arms trafficking, large-scale document and identity fraud operations, and money laundering. In recent years, numerous Hezbollah operatives, Venezuelan government officials, and transnational criminal figures have been linked to one another in a variety of criminal schemes. Some believe that Hezbollah’s vast and sophisticated network of businesses that are used for laundering the proceeds of drug and other illicit activities put Hezbollah on the same level as the Mexican drug cartels as a hybrid threat for organized crime and terrorism.
The governments of the United States and Colombia have jointly investigated and prosecuted more than 100 individuals participating in cocaine trafficking schemes linked to Hezbollah operatives based in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Lebanon, and Syria. These schemes included an arms-for-cocaine deal brokered in 2014 by Ghazi Nasr al-Din, a dual Lebanese-Venezuelan citizen whom Chavez appointed to be ambassador to Syria, involving Venezuela’s then-interior minister Tareck El Aissami and Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon.
Fraudulent document acquisition has been a key element of the Hezbollah criminal enterprise. The organization has been able to obtain fraudulent Venezuelan passports and other national identity documents with the assistance of high-ranking Venezuelan government officials. Its operatives have been given access to the Venezuelan state-owned airline and the banking system. Expert Joseph Humire, now deputy assistant secretary of war for western hemispheric affairs, told my former colleague Todd Bensman that he had seen dozens of cases of individuals who got the full set of records needed to establish new identities: “New birth certificates, passports, banking, and property all get put under these names so that that person now has a document ledger saying they were born in Venezuela.” Humire said that his organization had uncovered links between the major human-smuggling organization that once moved significant numbers of Venezuelans and the state-run airline that most often flew the migrants into Guatemala or Mexico for their journey into the United States.
While experts debate the degree to which the Hezbollah’s criminal activities present a direct threat to the United States, the evolving global security and migration situations suggest that the threat is more salient than ever before, due to the damage inflicted on Hezbollah in the Middle East and the unprecedented access to American territory presented by the Biden administration’s open-border policies from 2021 to 2024.
Hezbollah has a long history of plots to attack Jewish and Israeli interests in South America, and as recently as the fall of 2023, Brazilian authorities arrested Hezbollah-linked individuals who were allegedly planning attacks on Jewish targets in the region. U.S. officials have long been concerned that Hezbollah is seeking to develop the capacity to strike against U.S. interests, possibly even from within the United States. Moreover, U.S. counter-terrorism authorities have previously disrupted plots undertaken by Hezbollah operatives believed to be members of a network of “sleeper” operatives who are embedded inside the United States and other countries in the hemisphere.
These concerns intensified during the Biden border crisis. The Biden policies allowed close to one million Venezuelans to enter the United States, either by crossing the border illegally, on legal temporary visas which they overstayed, or through a parole program for those not qualified for visas.
U.S. immigration officers have had a very limited ability to look into the backgrounds of migrants from Venezuela due to the break in diplomatic relations and the overwhelming number of cases to process. This lack of vetting has raised concerns that Hezbollah operatives may have entered the United States undetected, and with the intent to launch attacks or expand criminal operations.
It is now known that at least one person of concern did take advantage of the open border. Issam Bazzi, a wealthy Lebanese-Venezuelan man with ties to Hezbollah-connected figures such as Tareck El Aissami, was caught swimming across the border illegally in November 2021 after hiring a human smuggler to bring him and his family from Matamoros, Mexico. After a background check and interview flagged him as someone with ties to a terrorist organization, Bazzi was held in detention for about two weeks, but then released to pursue an asylum claim. He settled in Michigan for several years. Notes Humire: “Is he just a Venezuelan Lebanese who is part of the community where everyone is fleeing the conditions in the country? Or one of those terror figures whose movement the [Maduro] government facilitated with new identities?” In July 2025, immigration authorities working under new enforcement policies put in place by President Donald Trump re-arrested Bazzi in Michigan and, according to recent reports, he is reportedly fighting a deportation order while in immigration detention.
The Department of Justice is also alleging ties between Maduro and several designated foreign terror-crime organizations that have played a role in human smuggling and human trafficking into the United States: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, and Tren de Aragua (TdA), a relatively new and equally violent gang whose presence here can be directly attributed to the Biden border crisis.
TdA started as a prison gang in northern Venezuela that, according to the indictment, also provided protection to certain drug trafficking organizations, and by 2019, its reputed leader, Hector Guerrero Flores, who is co-indicted with Maduro, claimed to control Venezuela’s coastlines for the purposes of facilitating drug trafficking. Around this time, violent and hardened TdA gang members began exploiting the huge flow of migrants fleeing economic and social collapse under the Maduro regime. According to the National Gang Intelligence Center, by 2023 the gang was believed to have between 2,500 to 7,000 members throughout Latin America. They established human smuggling and trafficking networks, extorted migrants, and became involved in drug trafficking. Wherever Tren de Aragua went, brutal violence followed as they enforced their demands and sometimes clashed with other local criminal organizations.
When Biden opened the U.S. border in early 2021, TdA began smuggling and trafficking Venezuelans — and their own operatives — into the United States. Overwhelmed U.S. border agents had no means to check the criminal backgrounds of the Venezuelans they encountered, were unfamiliar with TdA, and were under instructions to release all but known criminal migrants into the country. As a general rule, all citizens of Venezuela were eligible to receive a temporary protected status that shielded them from immigration enforcement and included a work permit and access to other benefits. Long after the fact, U.S. law enforcement agencies realized that thousands of TdA members had succeeded in entering the country, settling and setting up criminal operations in at least 10 U.S. states, including New York, Florida, Texas, Colorado, and Illinois.
Local authorities were unprepared for the wave of unusually violent criminality that eventually was connected to Tren de Aragua. These crimes included assassinations of former Venezuelan officials, theft rings, sex trafficking of Venezuelan women, extortion of Venezuelan migrants, drug and weapons crimes, and random acts of violence, including several brutal murders of young American women, whose cases became flash points in the growing public outcry against the Biden border policies that were highlighted by Donald Trump in his presidential campaign in 2024. Federal law enforcement agencies scrambled to understand Tren de Aragua and its command structure, and to uncover any links between the gang and other criminal organizations, in particular the Maduro government, which is involved with the Cartel de los Soles.
One former high-ranking Venezuelan army officer and security analyst notes:
Tren de Aragua isn’t a rogue band of street punks: it’s the muscle car hitched to Maduro’s smuggling convoy. Think of it as Caracas outsourcing hybrid warfare: the cartel ships cocaine north, the gang escorts the loads and terrorizes migrants, and the regime pockets hard currency while claiming clean hands.
Shortly after taking office, Trump designated TdA as a foreign terrorist organization, along with MS-13 and the largest Mexican cartels, citing attacks on U.S. law enforcement officers, and other violence. In April 2025, federal immigration authorities announced that more than 2,700 members of TdA had been arrested.
Many experts believe that a clear convergence of criminal and terroristic activities has occurred among the most significant transnational crime groups operating in the Western hemisphere, as illustrated by both Hezbollah’s many criminal enterprises and by Tren de Aragua’s swift trajectory from an obscure regional prison gang to a top-tier threat in the Americas. These activities occur within a tangled web of networks that was at least in part enabled, protected, and even utilized by the regime of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela.
This convergence has required the new approach taken by the Trump administration, much in the way that we adapted to the elevated threat of terrorism after 9/11. It includes coordinated multi-jurisdictional operations led by the federal government and use of legal authorities that are triggered by designating groups as transnational crime organizations or terror groups, which serve to enable law enforcement agencies to attack the financial assets of the targeted groups, and also allow for steps to deny entry and immigration benefits to associates of these groups and to apply accelerated forms of removal from the country.
To succeed, U.S. law enforcement agencies must also attack the logistics networks that support transnational terroristic and criminal activity. These networks include not only production and transportation of illicit goods, but also networks that help operatives move across borders, such as the identity and travel document rings and human smuggling organizations. It almost goes without saying that if these groups cannot move people and contraband across borders, then their revenue and power will be severely curtailed. For this reason, robust immigration controls will remain vitally important to continue the disruption of foreign terror-crime organization’s activities.