Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait the US imposed devastating sanctions on Saddam Hussein's regime that continued for over a decade until 9/11 was used as an excuse to topple a regime that really had nothing to do with 9/11 at all. Let's also remember that Saddam Hussein was a US creation, a foil against Iran. The US supplied weapons to Iraq to figh ta war with Iran that cost over a million lives. And why was Iran an enemy of the US? Because there was a revolution against the US puppet Shah regime after the US backed a coup against the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953.
So for a decade we got to see the impact of those sanctions and also get to look back at the aftermath. A report came out claiming that half a million children had died as a result of those sanctions. On 60 Minutes in 1996, then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State responded to this question [1]:
> “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
> “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Did the sanctions topple the regime? No. They almost never do. Arguably they played a role in ending the apartheid regime in South Africa but other than that, economic sanctions are simply used as a tool to punish our enemies without using a single soldier.
Roughly 8 million Venezuelans have fled in the last decade as the country has descended into chaos. It's a big part of why there's been a more than tenfold increase in people crossing the Darien Gap. Also responsible is US bribing countries in Central America to deny visas to likely refugees, forcing them to make this dangerous journey.
The sanctions on Venezuela have crushed the economy [2]. They have created the very refugee crisis that is now a domestic political issue. And it's not the leaders of Venezuela who suffer. It's people like this who risk death to try and have a better life.
You might say "Maduro is a bad guy". I'll put that up agains tth elong list of "bad guys" the US is entirely happy to support and work with: Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Ferdjinand Marcos, Pol Pot, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu.
This isn't a partisan issue either. Both politicla parties are pretty much united when it comes to US foreign policy. Sanctions on Venezuela have a history through the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.
So if you read a story like this and have empathy for refugees fleeing chaos and violence or maybe you simply see the (completely made up) "border crisis" and don't understand what's going on, I would hope that you can see the direct connection between these migrants and the US policy that destabilized or destroyed the countries they're mostly coming from.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-m...
[2]: https://www.wola.org/2020/10/new-report-us-sanctions-aggrava...