Less than a year ago, Republicans in Congress warned that Venezuela was emptying its prisons of violent thugs and shipping them through migrant caravans into the U.S. through the southern border.

They were laughed at. They were "fact-checked" by usual Soros types such as the denizens of Politifact.

But sure enough, the reports cited were real and the Venezuelan thugs are here.

CHICAGO — A Venezuelan migrant has been arrested three times since he arrived in Chicago three weeks ago, authorities said Tuesday as he appeared in felony bond court on a retail theft charge.

And while city officials try to figure out how to handle the steady flow of migrants, Tuesday’s hearing aimed a spotlight on another issue: Authorities may not know who some of the migrants are.

Anduesa Cormena, 34, and Yeiber Colmenarez, 22, were arrested Monday at Macy’s, 111 North State, after they tried to steal hundreds of dollars worth of clothing, Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Sorrentino told Judge Maryam Ahmad during the court session. 

Which corresponds pretty well to what the congressmembers were warning about all along:

The thugs cited in the latest incident aren't the first ones.

From their luxury hotel in New York City, Venezuelan thugs organized a broad-daylight group looting of a Macy's department store on Long Island.

According to the New York Post:

Four [Venezuelan] migrants who were busted for allegedly shoplifting at a Long Island Macy’s after being bused to the Big Apple from Texas won’t face deportation — unless they’re convicted, sources and legal experts said Tuesday.

The men, who are charged with stealing more than $12,000 in merchandise from Macy’s Roosevelt Field earlier this month, are getting a break because they are asylum seekers, not illegal immigrants who crossed the US border.

I wrote about that here.

These are just the better-known crimes coming at us from Caracas. Some other random crimes I noted earlier were these:

Increasingly, we are seeing crime rising and heinous crimes committed by the participants in the current border surge.  A recent Venezuelan migrant went berserk in New York City, prompting the city to blame the police officer who attempted to stop him.  In California, another illegal alien from Venezuela beheaded the mother of his children with a sword.  The Venezuelans as a migrant group seem to have many criminals in their ranks, which appears to be a reflection of the massive crime in their own country.  While some Venezuelans indeed may qualify for asylum, these people should not even been allowed in the country under Biden's catch-and-release policy.   

The country has the world's highest murder rate, the dynamics of which I described here in an Investor's Business Daily editorial written in 2009:

Ever since [Hugo] Chavez became president in 1999, Venezuelan cities have become hellholes in which murder rates have more than quadrupled. At 233 per 100,000, or one murder every 90 minutes, the rate in Caracas now tops that of every war zone in the world, according to an official National Statistics Institute study released Wednesday.

In fact, crime is the defining fact of life in today’s Venezuela. About 96% of all murder victims are poor and lower-middle class, the very people Chavez claims to represent. “Don’t venture into barrios at any time of the day, let alone at night,” warns the Lonely Planet guide to Venezuela to hardy adventure travelers.

By contrast, the murder rate in cartel-haunted Juarez, Mexico, is 133 per 100,000, with Mexico’s overall rate 8 per 100,000, about the same as Wichita, Kan. Colombia, fighting a narcoterror war since 1964, has an overall rate of 37 per 100,000, slightly higher than Baltimore at 36.9. The overall U.S. rate is 5.4.

Make no mistake, a murder rate like Caracas’ is a crime against humanity. The absence of personal security renders all other human rights moot. By coincidence, that’s just what Chavez seeks to eliminate as he turns his country into a Cuba-style socialist state. Instead of Castroite firing squads or Stalinesque gulags, Chavez outsources the dirty work of socialism to criminals while throwing dissidents in jail and threatening to censor newspapers.

And yes, they are bringing the crime with them. As early as 2018, the murder rate in Venezuela reportedly went down based on out-migration, meaning, the killers took their act with them -- to other countries, including the states.

According to Reuters:

Worse still, these thugs are closely aligned with the Venezuelan state and its aims.

How did crime get so bad in Venezuela? Because crimes were not enforced, the locals told me when I visited Caracas in late 2005.

Hugo Chavez turned a prosperous country with low crime rates into the dump it's become now simply by stating the Liberation Theology dictum that the poor should not be prosecuted for crimes because there was a preferential option for the poor. How holy of them. The country went downhill fast after that.

Criminal gangs then became enforcers for the state in the shantytowns and they continued to commit crimes as they amassed power. 

The thugs of Venezuela also seemed to have trained Black Lives Matter and possibly Antifa in the ways of power -- based on this group of reports I cited here. 

Now they're here, bringing straight, raw crime, courtesy of Joe Biden's open borders. States such as New York can't even deport them on the spot based on the hideous asylum laws that permit the worst criminals to do what they want with impunity.

A whiff of what Venezuelan thugs are like can be viewed in this trailer for Secuestro Express, a terrifying movie about an express kidnapping in Venezuela, whose cast included actual Venezuelan thugs:

Coming to a country near you.

Joe Biden is effectively importing crime without consequences from foreign countries based on his open borders and this slew of crimes now happening.

Image: Screen shot from Secuestro Express YouTube video clip.