The case against Maduro

Former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro appeared in a New York City federal courtroom on Monday to face four charges related to drug trafficking. Days earlier, he governed roughly 30 million Venezuelans, although evidence shows he didn’t win the country’s 2024 election.

But in a nighttime operation early Saturday, U.S. military personnel infiltrated Venezuela and apprehended Maduro. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a news conference discussing the operation, described the military raid as a “law enforcement function.”

On Monday, Maduro pleaded not guilty to possession of machine guns and destructive devices, conspiring to possess such equipment, engaging in a narco-terrorism conspiracy, and engaging in conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States.

Many experts say the U.S. government had good reasons for arresting Maduro, arguing the maneuver protects America’s national security and noting the former Venezuelan leader and his associates have engaged in criminal activity. But while some praise the Trump administration’s seizure of Maduro, others harbor concerns about the method by which it did so. And some suspect that the Trump administration’s motives weren’t purely focused on pursuing justice.

Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute, said it’s possible to support Maduro’s capture but not support the weekend military operation. “We can have a valid indictment here of someone who is credibly alleged to have engaged in some pretty serious criminal behavior on the one hand,” Neily said. “On the other hand, we can be—and I think should be—very concerned about the manner in which the U.S. government has decided to go about apprehending this person and bringing him to court in the United States.”

The indictment against Maduro, which the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed over the weekend, alleged that he and several co-conspirators, including his son and his wife, engaged in a decades-long enterprise that trafficked thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States. The indictment alleges claims largely similar to those the DOJ previously made against Maduro in 2020.

Venezuela has operated as a transit country, said Roxanna Vigil, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked on U.S. government policy toward Venezuela for roughly 10 years. The country doesn’t grow and produce illegal drugs, Vigil said, but has allowed the drugs to flow through on their way to other countries, including the United States.

U.S. courts have convicted family members of Maduro and his wife on drug-related crimes before, and some of their other relatives have faced accusations of participating in drug trafficking, Vigil said. “So there is a problem within the regime of officials using their positions to engage in drug trafficking activities,” she added.

Rich Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained that Venezuela has provided a safe haven for members of criminal organizations of all stripes under the Maduro regime. Those included the Sinaloa Cartel, widely considered the biggest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world, and the Zetas, a paramilitary group and drug cartel that has operated in Mexico for decades.

The Trump administration designated both groups as foreign terrorist organizations in February. But other groups that have held that title for much longer—like Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—have also had ties to Venezuela, Maduro, and his regime, Goldberg said.

“It’s a hub of operations for drug traffickers, drug financiers, and terror financiers,” Goldberg said. “That’s why you hear the term narco-terrorism attached to Maduro and Venezuela.”

Gangs in every major U.S. city are often extensions of the cartels and the violence they bring with them, Goldberg said. Those gangs receive financing from the Mexican cartels that the DOJ names in the Maduro indictment.

In the indictment, the DOJ described the Zetas as “violent and prolific” and said the group often recruited Mexican special forces to fill its ranks. Both the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel—and their subsidiaries and offshoots—have routinely used brutal acts of violence to retain control over their members and portions of Mexico, the DOJ said. Mexican drug cartels frequently use decadent displays of violence across South America and even in the southwestern United States.

“We’re talking about beheading people and leaving their heads in certain places for people to find when you want to send a message,” Goldberg said. “I mean, this is like old school Godfather-type stuff.”

Maduro provided the cartels with a location where they could carry out illegal operations without worrying about interference from law enforcement, Goldberg explained.

But while the Trump administration included Venezuela’s connections to drug trafficking and violent criminal gangs in its calculus, enforcing the law against drug cartels doesn’t seem to be the main goal of this operation, argued Clark Neily from Cato.

“Both motivations are plausibly present here,” Neily said. “But I certainly get the impression that the primary objective here was to remove Maduro from power in Venezuela and to create a situation in which Venezuela will be more amenable to U.S. interests and less amenable to the interests of foreign countries such as China, Russia, and Cuba.”

On Saturday morning, hours after the overnight military operation concluded, President Donald Trump touted its success. At a news conference that day, he said that the United States would indefinitely retain control and oversight of Venezuela. He discussed at some length how the United States would handle Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and only briefly remarked on Maduro’s drug trafficking activities.

Neily also argued the Trump administration’s manner of apprehending Maduro may be unconstitutional. While the U.S. Constitution isn’t precise about gray areas of military operations such as this one, Neily said the Trump administration should have provided notice to some or all members of Congress.

“If it’s a truly sensitive operation where a leak could either derail the operation or put U.S. forces at risk, there’s a procedure for notifying a limited subset of Congress that would include the leadership of both houses and the chairman and the ranking members of the intelligence and potentially armed services committees,” he said.

But Goldberg argued there is precedent—even from Democratic presidents—for engaging in unilateral military acts without notifying Congress. President Barack Obama directed the 2011 military operation that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, which had an internationally recognized, democratically elected government, Goldberg noted. Venezuela, on the other hand, doesn’t have a democratically elected or internationally recognized government.

Venezuelans could yet see more action from U.S. troops. Trump has asserted he intends to take control of Venezuela at least temporarily. For Neily, that doesn’t sit right.

“For the United States to be put in the position of essentially having to run a whole other country,” Neily said, “especially one of the strategic significance of Venezuela, without any input from Congress, and just by the unilateral decision of a single sitting president, strikes me as deeply concerning.” 

—This story was updated Jan. 6 to correct a quote, attributed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, describing the military action in Venezuela.