More than half a million Venezuelans have entered the US illegally since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Until Biden became president, few Venezuelans arrived illegally. Only around 4,500 arrived in 2020. After Biden's inauguration, however, numbers exploded: 50,499 Venezuelans illegally entered in 2021, another 189,520 in 2022 and a whopping 334,914 in 2023.

This means that Venezuelans now rank second in illegal immigration into the US, after Mexicans, who still take the number one spot.

For more than two decades, Venezuela has been a close ally of Iran, and a regional home base for Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in the Middle East. Hezbollah, according to one 2020 Atlantic Council report, helped to "turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism."

Iran's Quds Force is a subsection of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Quds Force runs Iran's terrorist operations abroad, and it established operations in Latin America with Venezuela's support during the Hugo Chávez regime (1999-2013), noted Jorge Serrano, a security expert and member of the team of advisors to Peru's Congressional Intelligence Commission. Quds Force has a local unit in Venezuela, Unit 840, which recruits and relies on local criminal groups to conduct assassinations and kidnappings. (The practice of hiring local criminals to do Iran's bidding has also spread to Europe.)