Were there “armies” of Venezuelans marching on the U.S. border under Biden

1. The scale: record encounters, not battalions

U.S. government and migration analysts record a rapid rise in Venezuelan border encounters from roughly 49,000 in FY2021 to about 188,000 in FY2022 and roughly 266,000 in FY2023, numbers that transformed Venezuelans into one of the largest nationality groups at the southwest border and created visible pressure on U.S. and regional systems ^{[1] [2]}. Those numeric surges are the empirical basis for political hyperbole, but encounters are administrative tallies of crossings, apprehensions and processing events — not evidence of organized, armed or militarized columns “marching” toward the United States ^{[1] [2]}.

2. Why Venezuelans were coming — push factors and pathways

The migration wave reflected a deepening economic and political crisis in Venezuela that produced mass displacement across Latin America, combined with changing legal pathways and U.S. policy choices — including Temporary Protected Status designations, parole programs and intermittent use of expulsions under Title 42 — that altered incentives and routes for migrants ^{[4] [1] [5]}. Analysts note the Biden administration paired restrictive measures (expulsions) with legal pathways (humanitarian parole and TPS) as a “carrot-and-stick” response to unprecedented Venezuelan arrivals, which helps explain both irregular crossings and larger legal admissions during the period ^{[1] [4]}.

3. What actually happened on the ground — protests, marches and mobility

On-the-ground reporting found isolated calls for protest or symbolic marches in migrant hubs — for example one man in Tapachula suggested a protest march but “there was little support for his idea” — and widespread movement northward through irregular routes like the Darién Gap, rather than coordinated mass columns converging on the U.S. border as an organized force ^[3]. Migration-policy reporting documents “record spontaneous arrivals” and increased overland journeys rather than any disciplined, army-like movement; coverage consistently frames the phenomenon as migration flows and humanitarian displacement, not military mobilization ^{[1] [3]}.

4. Political rhetoric, claims of gang shipments, and fact checks

Political actors used combative language to describe Venezuelan flows and occasionally alleged that Maduro’s regime was intentionally sending criminals north; those specific claims — such as assertions Maduro dispatched the Tren de Aragua gang to the U.S. — were found to lack corroborating evidence by fact-checkers, and reporters and analysts urged caution about conflating criminal incidents with organized state-backed migration schemes ^[6]. Advocacy and policy outlets offered competing interpretations — some emphasizing failures in U.S. border management and others stressing regional enforcement and migration drivers — which illustrates how the same numbers were reframed depending on political aims ^{[7] [1]}.

5. Verdict: rhetoric versus reality

Labeling the phenomenon “armies” overstates and militarizes what contemporaneous data and reporting describe as massive migration flows, legal admissions and episodic, localized protests or movements; the documented evidence supports a conclusion of high-volume migration and policy strain under Biden, not coordinated armies marching on the border ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Where claims go beyond those documented facts — implying state-directed armed columns or systematic gang deployments — independent fact-checkers and mainstream reporting found little or no evidence ^[6], though political incentives to exaggerate the scale and intent of migration were strong on multiple sides ^{[7] [4]}.