The Don Jones Index

Maduro’s final plea: ‘No war. Yes peace.’

Reporting from Mexico City

Two nights before his capture, Nicolás Maduro was driving around Caracas, making a plea to the American public.

“The American people should know that here they have a friend — a friendly, peaceful nation — and a friendly government, too,” he said, looking into the camera during a New Year’s Eve interview with a Spanish journalist, conducted as Mr. Maduro gave a tour by car of his nation’s capital.

“Our message is very clear: ‘No war. Yes peace,’” he added, offering a slogan in English that he had been repeating for weeks. He then handed the journalist, Ignacio Ramonet, a red hat in the style of the Make America Great Again cap with those same words.

The hourlong drive on New Year’s Eve was Mr. Maduro’s last known interview, broadcast on Venezuelan state television just hours before American forces swooped into Caracas and captured him, and it provided a final glimpse into the mind of the Venezuelan autocrat as the U.S. military was pressing in.

As he steered a silver Toyota S.U.V. with his wife, Cilia Flores, in the back seat, Mr. Maduro boasted about his success running Venezuela and accused President Trump of devising pretexts to invade his nation. Most of all, he made clear that he had no interest in a fight.

“For Venezuela to be great, we don’t have to hurt anyone,” he said. “Just like the United States. They want to be ‘great again.’ Well, let them be great through hard work, effort, and a commitment to peace — not through threats and war. Enough is enough.”

The line echoed Mr. Maduro’s effort to cast himself as a peace-and-love president of sorts in recent months. In rallies across Venezuela, he sang “Imagine” by John Lennon, danced to a techno beat paired with his peace slogan, and mimicked Bobby McFerrin in his famous tune encouraging listeners to relax.

In other words, if Winston Churchill had “Keep Calm and Carry On” in the face of a foreign threat, Mr. Maduro was trying “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Mr. Maduro has also frequently been defiant, however, saying that Venezuela would defend its homeland against what he called imperial forces.

But in his New Year’s Eve interview, even as the U.S. military had him in their sights, Mr. Maduro said he was eager to make a deal.

“The U.S. government knows this because we’ve told many of their officials,” he said. “If they want to have a serious conversation about an antidrug agreement, we’re ready. If they want Venezuelan oil, Venezuela is ready for U.S. investment — like with Chevron — whenever, wherever, and however they want. People in the U.S. should know that if they want comprehensive economic development agreements, Venezuela is right here.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio questioned whether Mr. Maduro had actually been interested in a deal. “Nicolás Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this,” he said in a news conference on Saturday. “He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man, chose instead to play around.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly called Mr. Maduro a cartel leader, and federal prosecutors on Saturday charged the Venezuelan politician and his wife, Ms. Flores, with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.

In his interview with Mr. Ramonet, Mr. Maduro rejected those accusations, instead saying that his government had fought cartels from Colombia — with lethal force, just like Mr. Trump. He said that Venezuelan forces had downed 431 aircraft trafficking drugs over its territory, though it was not clear over what period of time he was referring to.

“Our model is effective, exemplary and highly efficient,” he said. “Everything else you hear is just a narrative that even people in the United States don’t believe.”

He said that the U.S. government had invented the accusation that Mr. Maduro was a cartel leader to justify invading Venezuela. “They can’t accuse me or Venezuela of having weapons of mass destruction, or nuclear missiles, or chemical weapons, so they invented an accusation that the U.S. government knows is just as false as the W.M.D. claims that led them into an eternal war,” he said. “They know it’s a lie. I believe we need to set all that aside and start talking seriously.”

Mr. Trump on Saturday said that he had spoken to Mr. Maduro “a couple of times,” including last week. Mr. Maduro denied reports of a more recent conversation, saying in the Wednesday interview that he spoke with Mr. Trump once, on Nov. 21, in a 10-minute, “very respectful” call.

“It was actually quite a pleasant conversation, though the developments following that call have not been pleasant,” he said. “We shall see. I leave everything in God’s hands.”

While the U.S. government was already planning his capture, Mr. Maduro was pointing out attractions in Caracas to Mr. Ramonet, a Spanish author who wrote authorized biographies of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, the dual leftist icons of Cuba and Venezuela. There was the plaza where Mr. Castro had held a large rally in 1959, the avenue that Mr. Chávez had filled during his campaign in 2012, and the statue holding aloft a Soviet flag.

Mr. Ramonet said this was the 10th consecutive year that he had interviewed Mr. Maduro, and that he had shown the successes of Mr. Maduro’s government that the international media sought to hide.

“For the Western media, direct democracy doesn’t exist” in Venezuela, Mr. Maduro replied. “I challenge them to debate in any neighborhood in Caracas they want, with our people, not with me. Let them debate the people, so they can see how a new democracy is being built.”

Mr. Maduro’s government has for years suppressed and censored journalists in Venezuela and helped control state-media broadcasts.

As Mr. Maduro drove, he also reminisced about his travels in the United States. “New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Queens, Manhattan, Washington,” he said. “I’ve driven there quite a bit. I told the U.S. President that: I know it well.”

On Saturday, Mr. Trump brought Mr. Maduro back to New York. He was expected to be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Mr. Maduro had something very different in mind for 2026. He said in the final hours of 2025 that this year would be about an important struggle.

“For 2026 — the year I’ve called the Year of the Great Challenge — we will overcome the turmoil and difficulties, and continue strengthening Venezuela as a country at peace,” he said.

“I surrender it all to God,” he added. “God knows what he’s doing.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:39 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Robert ChiaritoAdam Sella and Raúl Vilchis

Protests and celebrations in U.S. cities follow Maduro’s capture.

Americans took to the streets of Chicago and Washington on Saturday to protest the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, even as Venezuelan migrants in New York gathered to celebrate the removal of Nicolás Maduro from power.

Holding signs that read “No Blood for Oil,” “No U.S. War on Venezuela” and “Hands Off Latin America,” a crowd of several hundred people gathered in Federal Plaza in Chicago as night fell. They called the operation to remove Nicolás Maduro, the ousted Venezuelan leader, an act of imperialism that Americans did not vote for, carried out without required Congressional approval.

“I’m 37 and grew up with the Iraq wars,” said Katrina Denny. “This morning, I was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re doing it again.’”

She said she thought that protests would grow if the Trump administration continued to use military force in Venezuela. “They filled half the plaza tonight on short notice, but this is only the beginning,” she said. “If this continues, I’m sure there will be many more events and larger ones.”

Many protesters expressed suspicion of the White House’s motives. “If Maduro wasn’t legally elected, that’s not for us to say,” said Adela Cruz, 51. “It just seems like a ploy to get oil.”

Jonny Bishop, 28, said he was worried for the men and women in the military. “As someone who teaches high school, my kids are the ones who may have to go to war,” he said, adding that with all of the other problems facing Americans, “going to war is the last thing we need.”

After the rally in Federal Plaza, the Chicago police allowed protesters to march up Dearborn Street to Wacker Drive, near Trump Tower Chicago.

In Washington, people on both sides of the issue gathered for separate afternoon rallies near the White House.

At one of them, dozens of opponents of the intervention chanted anti-Trump slogans. One of the organizers, Morgan Artyukhina, 38, said their message was “that this is a war that is being waged by the Trump administration, not just in contravention of U.S. law and international law, but also, falsely in the name of the American people.”

A few blocks away, a smaller group celebrated the capture of Mr. Maduro by U.S. troops.

Draped in a Venezuelan flag, Leonardo Angulo, 35, danced near a statue of Simón Bolivar, who helped free Venezuela from Spanish imperial rule. Mr. Angulo, who has lived in the United States for eight years, said he and his family came out “to celebrate, and gather with my people, because we share this feeling, this feeling of joy, of happiness, of hope most of all.”

Still, there was an undercurrent of anxiety, which one person in the crowd attributed to concerns that federal agents would appear and detain the Venezuelans present at the rally.

In New York, Venezuelan migrants described a mix of euphoria, relief and guarded hope after years of exile.

Beatriz Hernández danced in Times Square as a group of 100 gathered in Midtown, waving flags and calling family members back home.

Ms. Hernández, 60, said the moment felt transformative for the Venezuelan diaspora forced to emigrate because of poverty and lack of freedom during Maduro’s administration.

“It’s a great joy, the news we received,” said Ms. Hernández, who is originally from Maracaibo, Venezuela. “We haven’t slept since 3 a.m. It’s almost 6 p.m. and I don’t think we’ll be sleeping anytime soon because of the adrenaline.”

Ms. Hernández arrived in New York four years ago after a long journey that she said included crossing the Darién Gap on foot before reaching the U.S. border, where she requested asylum.

“The news is a hope of being able to return safely to our country,” she said. “I think that now I will be able to see my daughters who stayed there, and that in the not-too-distant future I will be able to return to my country and hug my sister.”

Lucia Coronel, 30, who is originally from Maracay, left Venezuela nine years ago and first emigrated to Colombia. She arrived in New York, where she requested asylum, three years ago.

“Now I don’t care about asylum,” Coronel said. “I feel a relief that opens up the possibility of returning to our homes voluntarily and safely. We didn’t emigrate by choice, we emigrated out of necessity.”

Other Venezuelans were more measured.

“We’ve gone through sadness and joy,” said Kimberly Castillo, 32, who is also from Maracay. “Sadness because nobody wants to see their country being bombed by another country. We are sad about the people who were caught in the middle, but are joyous knowing now there is the possibility for better times for my country.”

Robert Chiarito reported from Chicago and Adam Sella from Washington, D.C.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:10 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jazmine Ulloa

Venezuelan asylum seekers worry about what comes next.

Alejandro Marcano Santelli fled his home country in 2009 after receiving death threats. He had worked for a news outlet that opposed the Venezuelan government and its eventual leader, Nicolás Maduro, who was captured by the United States and brought to New York on Saturday to face drug charges.

Mr. Marcano Santelli, 57, who now lives in Miami, said a feeling of immense joy washed over him when he heard the news of Mr. Maduro’s removal from Venezuela.

More than 15 years ago, he and his family obtained asylum in the U.S. within days and, then, eventually, citizenship. With Mr. Maduro in power, however, Mr. Marcano Santelli had not been able to return to Venezuela, as his mother had lost her memory and died. He has not seen his brother in nearly two decades.

Still, he realized that the reaction in the community around him had been much more mixed, as the immigration status of many Venezuelans, a majority of whom have entered the United States in the past decade, has become increasingly tenuous.

“There is pain and happiness, but above all, worry,” Mr. Marcano Santelli said.

Nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled their troubled country, the largest exodus in Latin America’s modern history and one of the largest crises of forced displacement in the world. As of June 2025, about 1.1 million had come to live in United States, including about 600,000 immigrants through a humanitarian program known as Temporary Protected Status.

Many Americans did not begin paying attention to the plight of Venezuelans until migration levels reached record heights under the Biden administration. As local and state officials struggled to shelter and assist migrants in major cities and in overcrowded shelters along the southern border, President Trump campaigned on the promise of carrying out mass deportations of migrants.

Soon after taking office, Trump administration officials moved to end T.P.S. protection for Venezuelans, a decision the Supreme Court has allowed to stand for now as litigation continues. After the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., the administration halted all asylum petitions and immigration applications filed for immigrants from 19 countries. The affected countries were those whose citizens it had restricted from travel to the United States earlier in the year, including Venezuela.

Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary, made clear in a statement to The New York Times on Sunday, that the administration had no intention of restoring the T.P.S. program, saying it had for decades “been abused, exploited, and politicized as a de facto amnesty program.”

Ms. McLaughlin added that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, “will use every legal option at the Department’s disposal to end this chaos and prioritize the safety of Americans.”

Speaking to Fox News Sunday, Ms. Noem said every Venezuelan T.P.S. holder “has the opportunity to apply for refugee status” and that an evaluation would follow. But the Trump administration last year set the refugee admission cap for fiscal year 2026 to a historic low of no more than 7,500 refugees. The previous ceiling, set by the Biden administration, was 125,000.

Trump administration officials have framed the measures as efforts to combat fraud and abuse in the national immigration system and to enhance national security. Immigration lawyers and Venezuelan American leaders have countered that the moves have been tainted with racial animus and sought to falsely cast a broad swath of the Venezuelan diaspora as criminals and terrorists.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump repeated familiar talking points, conflating immigration with crime and drug trafficking, as he denounced gangs and criminal organizations that he said had inflicted crime and terror in American cities.

“As I’ve said many times, the Maduro regime emptied out their prisons, sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives,” Mr. Trump said. At the same time, he added, among the most significant beneficiaries of the U.S. operation would be those who “got thrown out of Venezuela that are now in the United States.”

“Some want to stay, and some probably want to go back,” he said.

Adelys Ferro, a founder of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, a grass-roots group representing Venezuelan interests in the United States, said that, as some Venezuelans were taking to the streets to celebrate, some others were staying inside, worried about immigration raids.

Despite entering the country under humanitarian programs once considered safe and legal, their lives have been thrust into uncertainty, Ms. Ferro said.

“We are victims of the Nicolás Maduro regime, but we are also victims of the Trump administration policies,” she said.

In a statement on Saturday, Eileen Higgins, the newly elected mayor of Miami, called on the Trump administration to reinstate the T.P.S. program, describing the decision to end it as “dangerous, reckless and wrong.”

Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether the administration would raise the refugee cap as it evaluates petitions from Venezuelan T.P.S. holders or whether T.P.S. holders will be able to apply for the status from within the United States. Under U.S. law, a person must apply from outside the country to be admitted as a refugee.

Legal challenges to the Trump administration’s efforts to rescind the T.P.S. program have been led by the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law. Ahilan T. Arulanantham, a lawyer with the center, said the instability in Venezuela underscored why T.P.S. holders should be allowed to remain in the United States.

Declarations entered in the case say that Venezuelan T.P.S. holders pay taxes and contribute to Social Security, and that they tend to hold jobs and to obtain higher education at greater rates than the broader American population.

In Manhattan, José, a cook from Venezuela, said that he had applied for asylum and T.P.S. as soon as he arrived in the United States in 2022. His T.P.S. has expired, and his asylum case has been pending in bogged-down immigration courts.

Since his last hearing in December, he has had to wear an ankle monitor.

On Saturday, he said he was feeling overjoyed that Mr. Maduro had been toppled, but that he was concerned about what would come next in Venezuela. Mr. Maduro’s reign, for Venezuelans inside and outside the country, elicits memories of food shortages, poor public services and economic decline.

“We still don’t know what is going to happen,” said José, who asked that only his first name be used for fear of retaliation from immigration authorities. “I want to wait it out here.”

At a cafe in Queens on Saturday, Rose Ramírez, 28, of Guárico, Venezuela, said she had been experiencing indescribable emotions since videos of the bombing in her native country began circulating overnight.

“If I had to choose one word to describe this moment, I would say it’s one of great joy and hope that we will have a more prosperous country,” said Ms. Ramírez, while caring for her 4-month-old son, who was in a stroller.

But Ms. Ramírez, who arrived in New York a little over a year ago and was still seeking asylum, also said a new period of uncertainty was now beginning.

“I think we will continue to be in limbo,” she said. “I would like to think that there will now be better cooperation and a better understanding of our legal situation here, but the truth is that it will take time for order to be restored.”

Raúl Vilchis contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:44 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Rylee Kirk

Speaking to CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Americans will benefit from the capture of Nicolás Maduro. “We can ensure that we have access to additional wealth and resources, enabling a country to unleash that, without having to spend American blood,” he said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:37 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Patricia Mazzei

Reporting from Doral, Fla.

Three Republican members of Congress from South Florida, where many Venezuelans live, held a news conference on Saturday praising the Trump administration’s capture of Nicolás Maduro. Representative Maria Elvira Salazar said the United States was restoring democracy in Venezuela and elsewhere. “We’re not an occupying power — we are a liberating power,” she said. Representative Carlos A. Gimenez said the United States has been ignoring the region for “far too long.” “Protecting American lives,” he said. “Protecting American interests.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:20 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Chelsia Rose Marcius

Nicolás Maduro, the ousted president of Venezuela, arrived in New York City by helicopter just before 7 p.m. on Saturday, according to a law enforcement official briefed on on Maduro’s movements but not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. The helicopter touched down at a heliport along the Hudson River near 31st Street, on the west side of Manhattan.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:26 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Tim Balk

After the helicopter arrived, a procession of vehicles flashing emergency lights headed downtown on the West Side Highway, which had been closed to southbound traffic.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:17 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Frances Robles

In wake of U.S. strike, Venezuelan paramilitaries barely hit the street.

Groups of armed civilians known as colectivos have long been known to support the leftist Venezuelan government — often with violence — but it was unclear on Saturday what role the paramilitaries would take to support the ousted president.

In the early hours of Saturday, groups of armed men in civilian clothes had begun to appear on the streets in Caracas, but not in large numbers.

Several men in civilian clothes were seen just after daybreak guarding the Gen. Francisco de Miranda air base outside of Caracas when the airstrikes hit. The men did not allow photographers to work in the area.

Later, Venezuelan soldiers, who allowed photographs, guarded the post.

Two pickup trucks filled with men wearing vests and civilian clothes, carrying gas cans as well as long weapons and handguns, were seen unloading outside the Centro Ciudad Comercial Tamanaco, a shopping mall near the air base that had been hit hours earlier. And in Cumaná, Sucre, a state about 250 miles east of Caracas, one resident reported seeing a caravan of colectivo members drive by, which sowed fear in the community.

Experts said it was notable that the thousands of armed men dispersed throughout the country seemed to be keeping a relatively low profile. However, the colectivos are often used to repress protests, and very few Venezuelans left their homes in the wake of the airstrikes Saturday.

Government officials who are still in power are probably eager to show the Trump administration that they can maintain order, and do not want images of chaos in the streets, said Alejandro Velasco, a Latin America historian at New York University, who is Venezuelan. Their only bargaining chip to stay in power is the ability to keep the peace, he said.

“I have to imagine colectivos have been given the order to lay low,” Mr. Velasco said.

Venezuela has long used the armed civilians to fight back against protesters. They have been known to work alongside police or military forces with no consequences for the excessive or even fatal force often used.

Their precise numbers are impossible to ascertain, but there are at least thousands of them throughout the country, Mr. Velasco said. They are funded by the government and often maintain public-sector jobs, although their true missions are as enforcers.

When protesters hit the streets in large numbers last summer after the Maduro administration announced that it had won the elections — contrary to what poll watchers had tallied — colectivos were unleashed throughout the country to repress protesters.

They originated as pro-government community organizations that have long been a part of the landscape of leftist Venezuelan politics. Experts say the civilians are essentially state-sanctioned paramilitaries, often used to fight back against protests, whether by students, labor unions or others.

The groups date back to the early days of President Hugo Chávez, who conceived them as social organizations to advance his vision of a socialist revolution to transform Venezuela’s poor neighborhoods.

About 300 colectivo members gathered Saturday afternoon at a pro-government rally a few blocks from Miraflores, the presidential palace. Several speakers went up on a stage to denounce the attack.

By early afternoon, they had yet to come out in large numbers throughout the city — particularly since no Venezuelans were in the streets to support the U.S. attack.

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has low approval ratings, and it was unlikely that he had enough support outside the colectivos to show force on the streets, as Mr. Chávez did when he was briefly ousted in 2002, according to a leading human rights activist who spoke anonymously to avoid reprisals.

On Saturday, the colectivos appeared to have been deployed only at the organized rallies that government supporters held in several locations, he said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:13 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Genevieve Glatsky and Annie Correal

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and Mexico City

The U.S. has indicted Maduro on charges of cocaine smuggling. Experts say Venezuela’s role in that trade is modest.

The United States unsealed an indictment on Saturday against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, that charges him with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.

The four-count indictment also charges Mr. Maduro’s wife, his son, two high-ranking Venezuelan officials and an alleged leader of the Tren de Aragua group, a gang that the Trump administration designated as a terrorist organization last year. President Trump has said that Tren de Aragua operates in conjunction with Mr. Maduro’s government, a conclusion that U.S. intelligence agencies have contradicted.

The indictment states that Mr. Maduro and his allies worked for decades with major drug trafficking groups to move large quantities of cocaine to the United States.

It follows months of a steadily escalating pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro, which culminated in his capture by the U.S. military in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. He arrived in New York on Saturday afternoon and will be flown in a helicopter to Manhattan for prosecution.

The pressure campaign began in September with lethal attacks by U.S. forces on small vessels that the Trump administration has said were carrying drugs from Venezuela to the United States. The administration has justified the attacks by saying the United States was in an armed conflict with drug cartels and vowed to destroy trafficking networks. Many experts say these strikes are illegal.

President Trump has asserted that the campaign is targeting drugs killing Americans, but most U.S. overdoses involve fentanyl, which doesn’t come from South America, experts say.

Fentanyl, which causes tens of thousands of overdoses per year, is almost entirely produced in Mexico using chemicals from China, according to U.S. authorities, and Venezuela plays no known role in its trade, nor does any other South American country.

The indictment unsealed Saturday focuses almost entirely on Venezuela’s decades-long role in the cocaine trade. It accuses Mr. Maduro and co-conspirators of working closely with some of the region’s largest drug trafficking groups, in Colombia and in Mexico. They include groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC, and the Sinaloa Cartel, which are also designated by the United States as terrorist organizations.

Experts, however, have said Venezuela is not a major drug producer and have described it as a minor cocaine transit country, with most of the cocaine flowing through Venezuela heading to Europe, not the United States.

The majority of the cocaine bound for the United States is believed to move not through the Caribbean but through the Pacific, according to data from Colombia, the United States and the United Nations. Venezuela does not have a Pacific Coast.

While the indictment states that Venezuela was shipping 200 to 250 metric tons of cocaine a year by around 2020, that represents only about 10 percent to 13 percent of the global cocaine trade. Other countries play a much larger role. In 2018, 1,400 metric tons passed through Guatemala, according to U.S. data.

There is evidence that Mr. Maduro has benefited from the drug trade to stay in power. Both the indictment and experts say he also used profits from drug trafficking to secure the loyalty of military officials and leaders in his party.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:02 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

A senior Venezuelan official says at least 40 people, including military personnel and civilians, were killed in the U.S. attack.

At least 40 people were killed in the U.S. attack on Venezuela early Saturday, including military personnel and civilians, according to a senior Venezuelan official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe preliminary reports.

President Trump, speaking on Fox News on Saturday, said that no American troops had been killed. He suggested, however, that some service members had been injured. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said later in the day at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump that U.S. helicopters moving to extract President Nicolás Maduro and his wife had come under fire. He said that one helicopter had been hit but “remained flyable,” and that all U.S. aircraft “came home.”

About half a dozen soldiers were injured in the overall operation to capture Mr. Maduro, according to two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. attack, details began to emerge of the death of a Venezuelan civilian in Catia La Mar, a low-income coastal area just west of the Caracas airport. There, an airstrike hit a three-story civilian apartment complex and knocked out an exterior wall early Saturday as U.S. forces assaulted the city.

The strike killed Rosa González, 80, her family said, and seriously wounded a second person.

In the afternoon, a government investigator was present in the area of the strike, interviewing witnesses and picking up projectiles.

Wilman González, Ms. Gonzalez’s nephew, said he ducked when heard the strike at about 2 a.m. but nearly lost an eye. He had three stitches on the side of his face.

Mr. González, who appeared numb hours later, showed journalists where the U.S. ordnance had hit. Asked where he would go now that he lost his home, he said simply, “I don’t know.” He spoke little as he bent down and searched for whatever valuables he could salvage. He picked up an old umbrella and carried a set of drawers.

The strike left the interior of an apartment exposed to the public. Among the wreckage was a portrait of Venezuelan independence hero Simón Bolívar that looked like it had been riddled with shrapnel.

One neighbor, a 70-year-old man named Jorge who declined to give his last name, said he lost everything in the airstrike.

Several people were gathered outside on Saturday afternoon while others searched what remained of their apartments. Most were barely speaking.

Some of the residents outside were praying. Others were angry.

One man, who gave his name as Javier, blamed greed for the attack on Venezuela, an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s stated desire to let American companies take control of Venezuelan oil fields. The lives of people like him, he said, meant nothing.

The residents said that four men had tried to rescue Ms. González after the airstrike. They carried her onto a motorbike and took her to a hospital, but she was declared dead on arrival.

Another woman was also taken to the hospital; residents were later told that she had survived, but was in critical condition.

Frances Robles and Mariana Martínez contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:39 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Sarah Nir

Reporting from Stewart Air National Guard Base in New York

A small group of protesters gathered at the edge of the Stewart Air National Guard Base. One boy had a Venezuelan flag draped around his shoulders as the group watched for any sign of ousted President Nicolás Maduro, who had arrived earlier. Alexander Silva, 36, a warehouse worker from Newburgh, N.Y., who fled Venezuela in 2022, brought his family to witness history. “I wanted them to see that this really had happened,” Silva said in Spanish, “that the dictatorship had been demolished.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:36 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonah E. Bromwich

A pardon and a prosecution in New York show Trump’s personal geopolitics.

Two Latin American strongmen were charged in Manhattan with corrupting their governments, using state power to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.

One, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was abruptly pardoned by President Trump last month.

The other, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, was captured on Saturday in a military raid that Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized as a law enforcement operation. Mr. Maduro was brought to the United States to face fresh allegations of narco-terrorism.

The divergent fates of the two men accused of similar crimes by the same prosecutor’s office underscore the way President Trump and his aides are using the federal justice system to conduct a highly personalized geopolitics.

Mr. Trump, when asked on Saturday about his December pardon of Mr. Hernández in light of the operation against Mr. Maduro, made no attempt to disguise his feelings about Mr. Hernández: He saw himself in the imprisoned president.

“The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country.”

The contradiction prompted an outcry from the president’s political opponents. “You cannot credibly argue that drug trafficking charges demand invasion in one case, while issuing a pardon in another,” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said in a statement on Saturday.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has long been the most prominent federal prosecutor’s office in the country and for years was known for its independence from Washington. It took on Wall Street, prosecuted high-ranking political officials from both parties and, in 2022, charged the ex-president of Honduras in what authorities would later characterize as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Two years later, prosecutors asked a judge to ensure that Mr. Hernández died in prison, saying that he had abused his power, had connections to violent traffickers and was responsible for the “unfathomable destruction” cocaine had caused in the United States. Mr. Trump pardoned him nonetheless.

“Trump thinks he can use federal criminal prosecutions for any purpose, which is to say to promote his foreign policy views, to promote his vendettas, to promote his self-interest and to promote his perceived political interests,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor who teaches legal ethics at Fordham Law School in New York.

Mr. Rubio, asked about the contradiction on ABC News on Sunday, referred questions to the White House, given that he was not involved in the pardon of Mr. Hernández.

“The president outlined yesterday that he felt that in that particular case there was unfairness,” Mr. Rubio said.

Pushed by the anchor, George Stephanopoulos, who emphasized Mr. Hernández’s conviction by a jury, Mr. Rubio appeared to grow frustrated. He said again he was not involved. When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked whether he supported the pardon, Mr. Rubio declined to comment, again citing his lack of familiarity with the specifics of the case.

Both the Hernández and Maduro cases began as Drug Enforcement Administration investigations around 2010, were investigated by the same D.E.A. unit and were handled by the same investigative unit in the Southern District.

Each prosecution was led at various stages by Emil Bove III, who eventually rose to lead the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit. After leaving the office, Mr. Bove became a criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and then a top Justice Department official. He is now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

The factual similarities in the cases are striking. It is not just that the charges resemble one another; prosecutors also accused both men of overseeing key way stations in the same hemispheric trade.

Taken together, the indictments provide a bird’s-eye view of the supply chain that for years has brought processed cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela to shipment points in Honduras and, ultimately, to the United States.

Mr. Hernández was charged in 2022 with conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and using machine guns as part of that conspiracy. The charges unveiled against Mr. Maduro on Saturday also include a cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns as part of it. The combination of the trafficking and gun charges makes the potential penalties in such prosecutions more severe.

In 2020, Mr. Maduro was one of six defendants charged with participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy, with prosecutors accusing him of leading a drug-trafficking organization known as Cártel de los Soles. Venezuelans have used the phrase for years, a reference to a sun insignia that high-ranking Venezuelan military personnel wear on their uniforms.

Mr. Maduro, that indictment said, “coordinated foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug-trafficking.” The newly unsealed indictment was even more specific, saying that the shipment points in Honduras — as well as in Guatemala and Mexico — relied on a “culture of corruption,” in which traffickers paid off politicians for protection and help.

One of those politicians, prosecutors persuaded a jury, was Mr. Hernández. Jurors in 2024 convicted him of having received millions from drug-trafficking organizations throughout the region.

When Mr. Hernández was extradited, Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, erupted in celebration, and, after his conviction, expatriates rejoiced outside the Manhattan courthouse. But after pardoning Mr. Hernández last month, Mr. Trump defended the decision, saying it was the will of Hondurans.

“The people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing,” he said.

Mr. Hernández’s wife has said he would not immediately return to Honduras, where authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest.

David Smilde, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who has studied Venezuela for decades and lived in the country part-time until last year, said that the prosecution of Mr. Maduro might be perceived differently by the eight million Venezuelans who live outside the country, compared with the roughly 30 million who are still there.

The diaspora, he said, might thrill to the prosecution, viewing Mr. Maduro as a Saddam Hussein-like figure whose capture could bring an end to the Venezuelan regime.

People who live in the country, Mr. Smilde said, were likely to be less moved, given that several Venezuelans were prosecuted in recent years, only to be returned to their home countries by the Biden administration. They include two nephews of Mr. Maduro’s wife who were convicted on drug charges in 2015 but released in exchange for Americans.

“With the U.S. justice system and its inconsistency in recent years, it’s not as big a deal as it used to be,” Mr. Smilde said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:32 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

In toppling Maduro, Trump risks blowback from his ‘America First’ base.

National Security reporter

Ousted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were transferred to the United States on Saturday via the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the F.B.I. had a government plane waiting to take them to Stewart Air National Guard Base north of New York City, according to a U.S. official familiar with the operation who was not authorized by the White House to speak publicly.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:23 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger

White House reporter

For months, a significant segment of President Trump’s political base has been complaining that he has spent far too much time on foreign policy — seeking a Ukraine deal and addressing a long list of other conflicts he claims to have settled — and too little on America’s economic anxieties.

His announcement on Saturday that the United States had captured Venezuela’s leader and would “run” the country for an indefinite period is adding fuel to that fire. As the scope of the operation was becoming clear on Saturday, critics said Mr. Trump risked getting the United States into the kind of open-ended conflict that he had railed against for years.

“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump ally turned critic, posted on social media. “Boy were we wrong.”

Mr. Trump, who has pledged to cease “endless wars” and reduce the number of American troops overseas, left open the prospect of deployment to Venezuela — something that he has spoken of only vaguely in the past. Speaking to reporters, he said the United States was “not afraid of boots on the ground,” adding that the administration planned to have a military presence in the nation “as it pertains to oil.”

“We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure,” Mr. Trump said in comments that stunned some Republicans who questioned how the vague plans squared with a commitment to refrain from military intervention and regime change. “We’re going to run it properly and make sure the people of Venezuela are taken care of.”

Mr. Trump in the past has risked alienating his base over military action, particularly in the run-up to his Iran strikes in June. Yet the targets in Iran were three underground nuclear sites, enabling Mr. Trump to launch a high-risk bombing raid from the other side of the world, bury the stockpiles of uranium and return home. The uproar died down.

What happened in Caracas, however, was different.

Mr. Trump decapitated the Venezuelan government and made no secret of the fact that the United States planned to pull the strings.

“We’re going to run the country right,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “It’s going to be run very judiciously, very fairly. It’s going to make a lot of money.”

With those words, Mr. Trump adopted a version of what former Secretary of State Colin Powell used to call the “Pottery Barn rule,” which boils down to you-break-it-you-bought-it. That did not necessarily mean a standing U.S. military force in Venezuela, similar to what the United States kept in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it did suggest continuing political intervention, with at least the threat of a military backup.

Mr. Trump said on Saturday that his administration was “prepared to do a second wave” after the first attack in Venezuela, but for now it was not necessary.

Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former State Department official under Mr. Trump, said the plan to run Venezuela was “just jaw dropping.”

“That is not something that the president has laid out, certainly during the campaign and even during the last few months,” Mr. Bartlett said.

Ultimately, the extent of any backlash may depend on what happens next.

“This is the difficult part,” said Dave Carney, a Republican strategist who ran Preserve America, a pro-Trump super PAC. “Nobody wants a quagmire. Nobody wants, you know, body bags coming back to Dover of American solders who are being sniped at from, you know, a rebellious minority in Venezuela.”

“If it goes on for three years, it will be negative,” Mr. Carney said. But if the presence in Venezuela lasts months, Mr. Trump “will be celebrated.”

In Florida, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, many did in fact respond to the capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, by celebrating in the streets. And many Republicans appeared ready to stand by Mr. Trump, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who initially seemed critical of the operation.

Mr. Lee later said in a social media post that after speaking to Secretary of State Marco Rubio he believed the military action “we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant” of Mr. Maduro.

The operation in Venezuela was also met with support from the foreign policy hawks that have long been a target of the MAGA movement.

“I’m grateful to the U.S. personnel who carried out orders in harm’s way,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky. “A free, democratic and stable Venezuela, led by Venezuelans, is in America’s national security interests.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have said that military action against Venezuela is aligned with his campaign promises by arguing that Mr. Maduro fueled domestic crises in the United States, including gang violence and a surge of drug overdoses caused by fentanyl.

The fentanyl that fueled America’s overdose crisis is, however, manufactured in Mexican labs using chemicals from China. The U.S. intelligence community also earlier this year undercut Mr. Trump’s claim that Mr. Maduro sent members of the Tren de Aragua gang to the United States, saying that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan leader.

Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and Trump ally who supported the Iran attack, joined Tucker Carlson and others in opposing the operation in Venezuela, maintaining that Americans will ultimately pay the price.

“Maybe soon we will see an invasion of Venezuela so that” Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, “can assume power in a country she will never be able to run without U.S. assistance.” The result, Ms. Loomer said, would be to pave the way for China, among others, to gain a deeper foothold.

Such views get to a central argument: Who owns the definition of America First?

Mr. Trump, who first played with the term in a New York Times interview in 2016, has said that he invented it — he didn’t — and therefore he gets to define it. Some of his MAGA faithful clearly believe otherwise.

But at the core of the dispute is the fact that Mr. Trump is no isolationist, even if many of his backers are.

The person who could face future political ramifications of a prolonged military presence in Venezuela is Vice President JD Vance, who is widely thought to be Mr. Trump’s heir to the MAGA movement. He was not present at Mr. Trump’s news conference on Saturday.

Mr. Vance, who monitored the operation in Venezuela by video conference, has in the past pushed for military restraint.

“No more undefined missions; no more open-ended conflicts,” Mr. Vance told a graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy earlier this year.

On Saturday, Mr. Vance expressed support for the military intervention.

“The president offered multiple off-ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: The drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States,” Mr. Vance said on social media. “Maduro is the newest person to find out that President Trump means what he says.”

Whether all of Mr. Trump’s supporters agree may be another matter.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:05 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William K. Rashbaum and Benjamin Weiser

Maduro is expected to make his first court appearance in Manhattan.

The cases of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, and his wife will move on Monday from the secretive realm of military special operations into the mundane world of Federal District Court in Lower Manhattan, where at noon they are to stand before a judge and face charges of drug-trafficking conspiracy and other crimes.

Their appearance will be the first step in what undoubtedly will be a yearslong prosecution, after a stunning change of scene from Mr. Maduro’s presidential palace in Caracas to the grim and grimy reality of pretrial detention in a Brooklyn federal jail.

Because of the extraordinary nature of the case, what happens next will be predictable in some ways, and perhaps far less so in others.

The arraignment on Monday will occur before the presiding judge in the case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, and Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are expected to enter pleas of not guilty. The judge will almost certainly order them detained. And it could be well over a year before a jury is seated to weigh the evidence against them.

But the prosecution of a leader of a sovereign nation snatched from his country in a highly choreographed military operation will most likely lead to arguments seldom heard in an American courtroom. Mr. Maduro’s lawyers might challenge, for example, the legality of his arrest and removal to the United States. They also could argue that as Venezuela’s leader, he is immune from prosecution.

What to Expect

Such initial hearings are often brief. Although the proceedings can vary, the judge will advise Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores of their rights and ask how they plead.

The indictment released on Saturday charges Mr. Maduro with narco-terrorism conspiracy and conspiracy to import cocaine, among other counts. Ms. Flores is charged in the cocaine conspiracy. The charges carry stiff sentences if the defendants are convicted.

At the hearing, a prosecutor typically summarizes the evidence, such as recordings, documents and other materials seized in searches. There may be discussion of what kinds of motions the defense will file to challenge the government’s case.

The judge is likely to address the issue of pretrial detention, and under the circumstances, almost certainly will order that the defendants be held without bond pending trial. The defense can also raise concerns about conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a troubled lockup that has held other high-profile detainees.

And the judge will ask the prosecutors and the defense lawyers how much time they will need to prepare for trial.

The Setting

The case will play out in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Court House, an imposing 27-story tower of granite, marble and oak on the edge of Chinatown. Security is always tight in and around the building, and Mr. Maduro’s presence there will doubtless bring a marked increase.

The court is part of the Southern District of New York, which has been the site of trials of accused terrorists, Mafia figures and corrupt politicians. A former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was extradited to New York in 2022 and tried and convicted two years later in the courthouse. (Mr. Hernández was pardoned recently by President Trump.)

The Players

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District, led by Jay Clayton, will handle the case of Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores. It is being prosecuted by assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to the office’s National Security and International Narcotics Unit. The charges stemmed from a lengthy and extensive investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Defense lawyers play a pivotal role in any criminal case. But because the Maduro prosecution is sure to raise difficult and complex issues — from the legality of his arrest to sovereign immunity to disputes over the possible role of classified evidence — his choice of lawyers and the strategy they chart will be crucial.

It is unclear who will represent Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores. .

Judge Hellerstein, 92, was appointed to the federal bench in 1998 by President Bill Clinton and recently presided over President Trump’s attempts to move his Manhattan criminal conviction into federal court, a matter that is still pending.

The Stakes

For the government, the stakes of the prosecution of Mr. Maduro could hardly be higher. The Trump administration has made it clear that it went to extraordinary lengths to capture him in Caracas and bring him to New York to face trial, unleashing the full might of the U.S. military.

And the case is interwoven with aspects of President Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — which, like the attack Saturday morning, have come under harsh criticism.

His focus on immigration has leaned heavily into a narrative that frequently cites the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — which Mr. Trump has tied to Mr. Maduro — as one of the reasons to pursue mass deportations. At the same time, the administration has pointed to the gang to justify its campaign of deadly military strikes on small boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that it says are hauling drugs linked to Venezuela. The administration has designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization.

While Mr. Trump has said that Tren de Aragua operates in conjunction with Mr. Maduro’s government, it is a conclusion that U.S. intelligence agencies have contradicted.

At stake for Mr. Maduro is his freedom. If convicted, he could face between 30 years and life in prison.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:48 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Who is Cilia Flores, the power broker first lady captured alongside Maduro?

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

When news broke that the United States had captured and indicted Venezuela’s longtime authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, another name appeared alongside his that left some observers puzzled: his wife’s, Cilia Flores.

Far more than a first lady, Ms. Flores is one of Venezuela’s most powerful political figures. She built extraordinary influence over decades while largely operating from the shadows. Ms. Flores shaped a judicial system in which nearly every major decision ran through her and embedded state institutions with relatives and loyalists, according to journalists, analysts and former officials. At the same time, they noted, her family amassed vast, unexplained wealth.

A lawyer from a lower middle class background, Ms. Flores began her political rise in the 1990s, becoming close to Hugo Chávez — the former president who was Mr. Maduro’s mentor and predecessor — while he was imprisoned after a failed coup attempt in 1992. She steadily climbed the ranks of Chávez’s socialist movement, known as chavismo, becoming a central figure in Venezuela’s legislature.

Ms. Flores and Mr. Maduro have been partners since at least the late 1990s, when both were lawmakers. They married in 2013, the year he became president. After Mr. Chávez’s death, she was widely seen as critical to consolidating and sustaining Mr. Maduro’s hold on power, bringing a loyal political base and deep institutional influence.

Within chavismo, she commands both respect and fear, said Roberto Deniz, a Venezuelan investigative journalist who has reported extensively on the Flores family.

“She is a fundamental figure in corruption in Venezuela — absolutely fundamental — and especially in the structure of power,” said Zair Mundaray, who worked a senior prosecutor under both Mr. Chávez and Mr. Maduro. “Many people consider her far more astute and shrewd than Maduro himself.”

In an interview published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in 2013, Ms. Flores called herself a “combatant” and defended hiring relatives.

“My family got in based on their own merits,” she said. “I am proud of them, and I will defend their work as many times as necessary.”

Though she stopped holding formal government posts after 2013, Ms. Flores retained immense behind-the-scenes authority. She is often described as a key architect of Mr. Maduro’s political survival.

“Within chavismo itself, they know the real power that Cilia Flores has, more so than perhaps the general public,” Mr. Deniz said.

Ms. Flores is also widely believed to wield decisive influence over Venezuela’s justice system. Many judges and senior officials are thought to be loyal to her or have been placed through her networks. The judiciary is considered thoroughly politicized, having failed to issue a single ruling against the state in more than two decades.

“It is a completely politicized, flawed, corrupt judicial system, and Cilia Flores bears a great deal of responsibility for what the Venezuelan judicial system has become,” Mr. Deniz said.

Investigative journalists have documented extensive corruption involving the Maduro-Flores family, including misuse of public funds and business links with sanctioned foreign businessmen. One investigation showed the family effectively taking over an entire street of luxury homes in Caracas, the country’s capital.

A federal indictment unsealed on Saturday charged Ms. Flores, along with her husband and son, with collaborating with drug traffickers.

“She has been basically co-governing the country since he came to power, and in many ways is the strategy or power behind the throne,” said Risa Grais-Targow, the Latin America director for Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “She’s been key to his staying power, but also now his downfall as well.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:33 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mariana Martinez

Reporting from Caracas, Venezuela

At least 40 people were killed in Saturday’s attack on Venezuela, including military personnel and civilians, according to a senior Venezuelan official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe preliminary reports.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:15 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Kellen Browning

How Democrats are hitting Trump over his ouster of Maduro.

Prominent Democrats both in and outside of Congress were quick to criticize President Trump’s attack on Venezuela on Saturday.

Out of power and lacking a clear leader, some of the most influential Democrats are among those considered a loose group of potential 2028 presidential contenders, a half dozen of whom had weighed in on Mr. Trump’s actions on social media and in television interviews within hours of his move to capture Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president.

Most tied Mr. Trump’s overseas intervention with his domestic woes, suggesting the president was seeking to distract from crises at home.

“It’s not about drugs,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote on social media, adding, “It’s about oil and regime change. And they need a trial now to pretend that it isn’t. Especially to distract from Epstein + skyrocketing health care costs.”

Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 presidential candidate and the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, wrote that Mr. Trump was following an “old and obvious pattern. An unpopular president — failing on the economy and losing his grip on power at home — decides to launch a war for regime change abroad.”

Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut centered their criticisms on affordability, a word that Democrats have seized upon to hammer Mr. Trump as the cost of living remains a top issue heading into this year’s midterm elections.

“Donald Trump’s unconstitutional military action in Venezuela is putting our troops in harm’s way with no long-term strategy,” Mr. Pritzker wrote. “The American people deserve a president focused on making their lives more affordable.”

Mr. Murphy wrote that the boost in military spending included in Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill last summer was “so he could invade and run Venezuela.” The president paid for it, Mr. Murphy charged, “by throwing millions of actual Americans off their health care and taking food assistance from millions of hungry kids” — a reference to the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps included in the bill.

Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, both military veterans with national profiles, also weighed in. Mr. Kelly, a combat pilot in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, called Mr. Maduro a “brutal, illegitimate dictator,” but warned that “if we learned anything from the Iraq war, it’s that dropping bombs or toppling a leader doesn’t guarantee democracy, stability or make Americans safer.”

Mr. Gallego referenced his time fighting in the Iraq War as a Marine, writing that this was the “second unjustified war in my lifetime.”

“The American people have been very clear: They do not want to be occupiers again and they do not want to be the world police,” he said in an interview on Fox News.

Representative Ro Khanna of California sent a fund-raising message off the news, blasting Mr. Trump in an email calling for “no more dumb wars” and asking recipients to share their contact information in a petition rejecting war with Venezuela.

On social media, he wrote that the “times call for a movement of the American people to stand against bloated defense budgets and warmongering.”

Hours later, Mr. Khanna threw a dagger at prominent Democrats who had not spoken out: “The silence from many media-hyped 2028 contenders today is shocking. If you cannot oppose this regime change war for oil, you don’t have the moral clarity or guts to lead our party or nation.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:12 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Sarah Nir

Reporting from Stewart Air National Guard Base in New York

A plane slowly taxied down the runway at Stewart Air National Guard Base outside New York City in the fading light Saturday. News crews filmed the arrival from the side of a snow covered airfield. After it stopped, people wearing jackets emblazoned with the F.B.I surrounded a staircase leading to one of the plane’s exits.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:03 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Chelsia Rose Marcius

The ousted Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife will be flown in a helicopter to Manhattan, according to a law enforcement source briefed on the security plan to bring Maduro to the United States. From there, Maduro will be driven to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York City headquarters in Manhattan. Then he will be taken by helicopter to Brooklyn and driven to the Metropolitan Detention Center. He is expected to be held there.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:00 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William Rashbaum

The plane carrying the ousted president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, has landed in the United States, two law enforcement officials said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:50 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Sheyla Urdaneta and Frances Robles

With the president gone, Venezuelans flock to supermarkets.

Venezuelans began lining up at supermarkets throughout the country on Saturday to stock up on supplies as they woke to the news that the United States had launched airstrikes on the capital and seized the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.

While many stores in Caracas, the capital, were closed, some that opened found dozens of people already waiting outside.

People filled their carts with water, toilet paper and other goods.

Few cars were on the streets, and there were no signs of public transportation. Areas near a military base that had been attacked lacked electricity.

Users of a private internet company, Vnet, reported service outages.

In Caracas’s Plaza Venezuela neighborhood, Alondra, a 32-year-old woman who did not want her last name published because of fears for her safety, said she had just returned to the capital after the December holidays and had no food at home.

“I’m not happy,” she said as she shopped. “I understand how delicate the situation is, and I’m afraid things will get worse in the country.”

Tensions mounted because some people were cutting the line, which was not budging.

“We’ve suffered so much,” she added. “I’m feeling hopeless, thinking that everything could get worse and that we won’t be able to hold out.”

Videos from La Candelaria, in downtown Caracas, showed dozens of people standing in line for food.

At a shop in a public housing complex in the city, about 10 people were lined up to fill water jugs.

In La Guaira, an area near where the strikes took place, residents sent videos showing damage to what appeared to be an apartment building. A local journalist said government supporters had taken control of the block and were prohibiting access.

In Valencia, a city two hours west of Caracas, supermarkets opened early.

Panic buying caused some people to bring two cars to transport all the goods they bought.

“We don’t know what is going on — nobody knows,” said Cecilia Martínez, 47. “But we are five people in my house and my parents are older than 80, so I can’t sit and wait until they say whether there is a curfew or not. That’s why I came here and spent all I had.”

José López, 29, at another store in Valencia, said he had bought two dozen eggs. “There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty,” he said.

In Zulia and Táchira, the states on Venezuela’s border with Colombia, 400 miles west of Caracas, people who lined up at supermarkets said their biggest fear was running out of food.

“Thank God we’re far from Caracas, but we’re afraid that bombings might come to Maracaibo, too,” said Martha Rangel, a 63-year-old woman who lives in that city. “I don’t have much money, but I’ll buy some cheese and flour to make arepas and have some at home.”

The governor of the state of Sucre, about 325 miles east of Caracas, appeared at a town square on Saturday morning and called for supporters of the ruling party to gather there later in the day.

“We demand that the entire world speak out against the threat and chaos they have tried to sow in our homeland,” said the governor, Jhoanna Carrillo.

People in Sucre had lined up for gasoline, although many pumps were closed.

Armed civilians who support the government had begun to gather in caravans in Cumaná, the capital city in Sucre, and many people were frightened.

“Everyone knows what that means,” said Alejandro Barreto, 26. “The only thing that matters now is buying food.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:37 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Farnaz Fassihi

United Nations bureau chief

The United Nations Security Council will convene an emergency meeting on Monday morning to discuss U.S. strikes in Venezuela. Russia, China and Colombia asked for the meeting after Venezuela’s mission to the U.N. wrote a letter to the Council president requesting the meeting to condemn and stop American strikes on the country. Secretary General António Guterres is expected to address the Council on Monday. He said in a statement earlier that all sides must uphold international law and the U.N. charter.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:36 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Nicholas Fandos and Maia Coleman

Mamdani called Trump to criticize the Venezuela strikes.

Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, called President Trump on Saturday to personally object to strikes the United States had conducted in Venezuela and to the capture of its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

“I called the president and spoke with him directly to register my opposition to this act,” Mr. Mamdani said at an unrelated news conference on Saturday, adding that he told Mr. Trump that he was “opposed to a pursuit of regime change, to the violation of federal and international law.”

The mayor declined to characterize the president’s response when pressed by reporters. His aides said that Mr. Mamdani had initiated the call earlier on Saturday afternoon and that it was “brief.”

“I registered my opposition, I made it clear and we left it at that,” Mr. Mamdani said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the call.

The remarks — and an earlier written statement — were the first time the mayor, a left-leaning Democrat, had clashed with Mr. Trump since taking office on Thursday. But it raised the possibility of more conflict in the days ahead after Mr. Maduro arrives in New York to face federal drug and weapons charges in Manhattan.

Mr. Mamdani has profound differences with the president, and has called him a “fascist.” But after the men had an unexpectedly cordial meeting at the White House in November, Mr. Mamdani had been careful not to directly stoke Mr. Trump’s ire — including in his inaugural address this week.

Mr. Mamdani sought on Saturday to play down how the call might affect that relationship.

“The president and I have always been honest and direct with each other about places of disagreement,” he said. “New Yorkers have elected me to be honest and direct and always to do so with the understanding that my job is to deliver for the people who call this city home.”

Mr. Mamdani will likely have little influence over what happens to Mr. Maduro in federal custody, even if the leader and a potential trial are being held within the city limits of New York. The mayor seemingly acknowledged these limits when speaking with reporters.

“It is my responsibility that whatever actions the federal government takes, that they have a minimal impact on the day-to-day lives of New Yorkers,” he said.

Mr. Mamdani has been an outspoken critic of American support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, but before his comments on Saturday, he had not had much to say about Venezuela or U.S. policy in Latin America. Both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Maduro describe themselves as socialists, though the policies Mr. Maduro presided over in Venezuela differ starkly from those Mr. Mamdani has vowed to pursue.

In a podcast interview last fall, Mr. Mamdani said Mr. Maduro had “done many a horrible thing.”

“Maduro’s government is one of repression, there is no question about it,” he said.

In labeling the American action unlawful, Mr. Mamdani echoed numerous other Democrats. But where other leaders in his party called Mr. Maduro an “illegitimate dictator,” Mr. Mamdani did not comment on his record or standing in Venezuela.

“This blatant pursuit of regime change doesn’t just affect those abroad, it directly impacts New Yorkers, including tens of thousands of Venezuelans who call this city home,” the mayor said in his written statement.

“My focus is their safety and the safety of every New Yorker,” he added, “and my administration will continue to monitor the situation and issue relevant guidance.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:07 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Rylee Kirk

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, said in a statement on X that the president “has broad constitutional authority and long historical precedent for the limited use of military force.” McConnell called Nicolás Maduro a thug and said he expected Congress to be briefed soon. “A free, democratic, and stable Venezuela, led by Venezuelans, is in America’s national security interests,” he wrote.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:52 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Simon Romero

Reporting from São Paulo, Brazil

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s new leader, boasts leftist credentials.

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s new interim leader, arrives at the job with impeccable leftist credentials.

She is the daughter of a Marxist guerrilla who won fame for kidnapping an American businessman, was educated partly in France, where she specialized in labor law and rose to meteoric heights in the government of Nicolás Maduro, whom she is succeeding.

But Ms. Rodríguez, 56, is also known for building bridges with Venezuela’s economic elites, foreign investors and diplomats, presenting herself as a cosmopolitan technocrat in a militaristic and male-dominated government.

After Venezuela’s economy endured a harrowing crash from 2013 to 2021, she spearheaded a market-friendly overhaul which had provided a semblance of economic stability before the U.S. military campaign targeting Mr. Maduro.

Her privatization of state assets and relatively conservative fiscal policy had left Venezuela somewhat better prepared to resist the Trump administration’s blockade of sanctioned tankers carrying oil, the country’s economic lifeblood.

The contradictions enveloping Ms. Rodríguez were on display on Saturday when she addressed the nation on state television. While President Trump said that Ms. Rodríguez had been sworn in as Venezuela’s new president, it was clear that Mr. Maduro’s supporters — including her — still see him as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.

Ms. Rodríguez repeatedly said that Mr. Maduro was Venezuela’s “only president,” and even the text on Venezuelan state television labeled her as vice president. When she ended, the state broadcaster immediately said that Ms. Rodríguez, as the vice president, had just made clear that Mr. Maduro remained Venezuela’s president.

Ms. Rodríguez rose to prominence after Mr. Maduro became president in 2013, following the death of Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s Bolivarian political movement, which blends left-wing and nationalist ideals.

Mr. Maduro appointed her as communications minister, before naming her foreign affairs minister, the first woman to hold that post in Venezuela.

Shuttling between Latin American capitals, she often seemed to revel in feuding with conservative leaders.

In 2018, Ms. Rodríguez was promoted again, this time to the vice presidency, and the head of SEBIN, a Venezuelan intelligence agency. She took on additional duties in 2020 as economy minister and proceeded to extend an olive branch to business elites in Venezuela.

But she has also been targeted by sanctions from the United States, Canada and the European Union for her role in supporting and helping to oversee crackdowns on dissent in Venezuela.

Her entry into Venezuelan politics seemed natural as the daughter of Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a Marxist leader who led the kidnapping in Venezuela of William Niehous, an American businessman who was held for three years in a jungle hide-out and rescued in 1979.

Her father was arrested and charged for his role in the kidnapping and died in 1976, at the age of 34, after being interrogated by intelligence agents.

Politics and leftist activism run in the family. Ms. Rodríguez’s older brother, Jorge Rodríguez, is another member of Mr. Maduro’s inner circle. He is the president of the National Assembly and was Mr. Maduro’s chief political strategist.

Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed reporting from Venezuela.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:50 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Julie Turkewitz and Genevieve Glatsky

Trump administration declines to back Venezuela’s opposition leader.

President Trump said on Saturday that it would be “very tough” for Venezuela’s leading opposition figure, María Corina Machado, to take control of her country, claiming in his televised speech that she was a “very nice woman” but “doesn’t have the support” in Venezuela to lead.

It was a dramatic shift from the Trump administration’s assessment of Ms. Machado’s movement in recent months, in which Washington officials have asserted that her surrogate, Edmundo González, is the country’s rightful president, after his election victory in 2024. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had called Ms. Machado “the personification of resilience, tenacity and patriotism.”

Ms. Machado has spent the last year courting Mr. Trump’s support and trying to enlist his help in ousting Mr. Maduro. She has openly supported his military operation in the Caribbean and refrained from criticizing his policies toward Venezuelan migrants. In October, she dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to him, in honor of what she called his “decisive support.”

On Saturday, after Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. military had captured Mr. Maduro, she released a statement celebrating the move and asserting that she was ready to lead.

“Today we are prepared to assert our mandate and seize power,” she wrote in a message she posted on X.

But roughly two hours later, when asked by a reporter about Ms. Machado after addressing the nation, Mr. Trump said they had not spoken. He never mentioned Mr. González.

Instead, he said that his government was in conversation with Mr. Maduro’s No. 2, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.

“Are you going to work with the vice president of Venezuela?” a reporter asked.

“Marco is working on that directly,” Mr. Trump responded, referring to Mr. Rubio. “He just had a conversation with her, and she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”

A spokeswoman for Ms. Machado and Mr. González said in a text message that the pair was not offering immediate comment on the speech.

Ms. Machado is a conservative former legislator from an affluent Venezuelan family whose ties to Washington go back two decades. She galvanized millions of Venezuelans to vote in favor of Mr. González in 2024.

Mr. Maduro lost the election, according to an independent monitor, but ignored the results and stayed in power. Mr. González eventually fled to Spain, and Ms. Machado went into hiding.

In recent months, speaking via video, Ms. Machado has backed Mr. Trump’s claims that Mr. Maduro is the head of two drug cartels and helped rig U.S. elections.

Ms. Machado resurfaced in public in early December in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. One of her top aides, Pedro Urruchurtu, wrote on X on Dec. 17 that she was no longer in Oslo and was “attending medical appointments with a specialist as part of her prompt and full recovery.” Ms. Machado said that she had suffered a fractured vertebra during her departure from Venezuela.

Her current whereabouts is unknown.

Mr. González was also in Oslo to celebrate her prize. Two weeks ago he made an appearance at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. Mr. González, who is 76, was briefly hospitalized in May for a sudden drop in blood pressure.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:48 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonathan Wolfe

Before Nicolás Maduro, there was Manuel Noriega.

The last time the United States deposed a Latin American leader was in 1989, when U.S. forces captured Gen. Manuel Noriega in Panama. That episode holds some striking parallels to the capture of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela on Saturday, with some major differences.

In December 1989, President George H.W. Bush sent U.S. troops into Panama with the goal of capturing Mr. Noriega, who had been the country’s military dictator for about six years. Mr. Noriega went into hiding in the Vatican’s Embassy in Panama City, where he was eventually captured, taken to the United States, tried and imprisoned.

Mr. Noriega, like Mr. Maduro, had been indicted on federal drug-trafficking charges. He was accused by U.S. officials at the time of taking millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers and turning Panama into a capital of international cocaine smuggling.

Months before both leaders were captured, the United States built up its military presence around their countries.

In Panama, President Bush sent nearly 2,000 soldiers and Marines to reinforce the 10,300 service members already there. The troops also began conducting military exercises, which U.S. officials said was part of their rights under previous treaties. But many saw it as an attempt to put pressure on Mr. Noriega.

As part of the pressure campaign on Venezuela, Mr. Trump has been building up forces in the Caribbean for months, and authorizing strikes on boats that the administration has said are run by drug traffickers. Many legal experts say these strikes are illegal and amount to extrajudicial killings of civilians.

The two Latin American leaders, however, had very different responses to the U.S. pressure campaigns.

In Panama, the National Assembly, under the control of Mr. Noriega, declared the country at war with the United States shortly before U.S. troops invaded. As the assault to capture him began, he fled with his mistress in an unmarked Hyundai and went into hiding, briefly emerging at a Dairy Queen before taking refuge at the embassy of the Holy See.

He was captured after a standoff that went on for days with U.S. troops, who surrounded the building and used speakers to blast heavy metal from bands like Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses until he surrendered.

Mr. Maduro, however, told a Spanish journalist as late as this week that he was eager to work with the United States to avoid conflict, including on drug policy and oil agreements.

Mr. Trump said during an interview on Fox News that Mr. Maduro wanted to negotiate in the final days before U.S. forces captured him — an offer that Mr. Trump said he rejected.

“I didn’t want to negotiate,” Mr. Trump said. “I said, ‘Nope, we got to do it.’”

Mr. Trump said that the military repeatedly rehearsed the operation using a replica of Mr. Maduro’s safe house. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the operation benefited from detailed information about his whereabouts collected during months of intelligence gathering.

Around 27,000 troops participated in the operation in Panama, and 23 U.S. troops were killed, along with an estimated 314 Panamanian soldiers and 202 civilians.

U.S. officials said the operation in Venezuela involved 150 aircraft. Since November, the United States has had around 15,000 military personnel in the Caribbean.

It’s unclear how many casualties were involved in the operation on Saturday, but Mr. Trump, speaking on Fox News, said no American troops were killed. He suggested, however, that some service members were injured.

Michael Crowley contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:36 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Airlines are canceling flights after the U.S. closes Caribbean airspace.

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

In an interview with The New York Times, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said he was reserving judgment on Delcy Rodríguez’s comments, in which she denied she planned to work with the United States.

“We’re going to make decisions based on their actions and their deeds in the days and weeks to come,” he said, referring to officials in the interim Venezuelan government. “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:36 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mark Walker

U.S. airlines canceled flights and air travel was disrupted on Saturday after federal aviation authorities shut down American-controlled airspace over the Caribbean in response to a U.S. military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of the country’s president.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a notice to airmen early on Saturday, known as a NOTAM, banning U.S. civil aircraft from operating, as the United States took action against the South American country, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

The F.A.A. cited “safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity” as the reason for the closure. The agency did not specify the nature of the military operations in its notice but said that the action was taken in response to the developments involving Venezuela.

Those developments became clearer later on Saturday, when President Trump announced the U.S. military operation. Mr. Maduro’s capture followed months of U.S. military pressure, including deadly strikes on vessels, described by U.S. officials as drug-carrying boats; the seizure of a tanker transporting Venezuelan oil; and a growing U.S. military presence in the Caribbean.

Airlines adjusted schedules and canceled flights into and out of Caribbean destinations like Puerto Rico, St. Lucia and Barbados as the order took effect. Passengers were advised to check with carriers for updated travel information.

In a post on social media on Saturday afternoon, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the F.A.A. had ordered the closures to “ensure the SAFETY of the flying public.”

“When appropriate, these airspace restrictions will be lifted. Please work with your airlines directly if your flight has been impacted,” he wrote.

Jessica Ramos, 24, a second grade teacher from Harrisburg, Pa., took a cruise with her mother this week to celebrate the New Year. Their cruise docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday morning, and they planned to fly to Philadelphia early Sunday morning. Around 10:30 a.m., as they disembarked their cruise ship, Ms. Ramos said she received a notification that their flight had been canceled.

“It was a little bit chaotic,” Ms. Ramos said in a phone interview on Saturday. “Everybody stormed into basically one hotel.”

Ms. Ramos and her mother began frantically searching for a place to stay, refreshing hotel websites all around the island. They ended up at a Holiday Inn with a one-night stay for $900, she said.

The next flight Ms. Ramos could book was on Jan. 10.

The airspace closure is the latest in a series of aviation restrictions imposed by the F.A.A. in response to tensions in the region, with officials saying they are intended to reduce the risk to civilian aircraft near military activity.

Delta, American and Southwest were among the airlines that had canceled flights on Saturday.

“Delta teams continue to monitor the situation closely, as the safety and security of our customers and people comes before all else,” the airline said in a statement.

Delta, United and JetBlue added that they had issued travel waivers for customers heading to and from the affected airports.

As of 3:07 p.m., the website FlightAware was reporting 724 delays and 49 cancellations, most of which were at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida.

On Saturday morning, the main international airport in Puerto Rico said on social media that most commercial flights operated by U.S. airlines were “suspended or may be temporarily canceled” because of the F.A.A. notice, but that foreign airlines were not included in the restrictions. The overwhelming majority of commercial flights to and from the island were canceled on Saturday, according to the website Flightradar24, which also showed two U.S. Navy aircraft flying nearby.

Caribbean Airlines, which serves U.S. cities including New York and Orlando, said on its website that its operations continued as scheduled on Saturday.

Gabe Castro-Root and Claire Fahy contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:24 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Maia Coleman

Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City said he called President Trump on Saturday and spoke with him directly to register his opposition to the strikes.

Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn, Mamdani said he made clear during the call that he was opposed to “the pursuit of regime change” and “the violation of federal and international law.”

“The president and I have always been honest and direct with each other about places of disagreement,” he said. “I was honest and direct in the Oval Office. I will be honest and direct in the phone conversations we have, and New Yorkers have elected me to be honest and direct.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:21 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Venezuela’s interim leader defies Trump and calls Maduro the ‘only president.’

Mexico City bureau chief

resident Trump said Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president and would act as a partner in letting the United States run the country.

“She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” he said.

Less than two hours later, Ms. Rodríguez — who was Nicolás Maduro’s vice president — delivered a televised address to Venezuela that made clear she viewed the United States as an illegal invader that must be rejected.

“We are determined to be free,” she said. “What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity.”

Her swift defiance of Mr. Trump made clear that his plans to swoop into the South American nation and run it as his own faced many more hurdles than he suggested in his Saturday news conference declaring victory in Venezuela.

“We had already warned that an aggression was underway under false excuses and false pretenses, and that the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective: regime change in Venezuela,” she said. “This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources. This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it.”

Significantly, Ms. Rodríguez delivered her address alongside what she called Venezuela’s National Defense Council, which included the nation’s defense minister, attorney general and the heads of the country’s legislature and judiciary. That unified front directly contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that the United States would run Venezuela, especially given that White House and Pentagon officials had said that U.S. aircraft and extraction forces had returned to the U.S.S. Iwo Jima.

Venezuela’s defense minister and attorney general also both publicly criticized Mr. Trump and the U.S. military action on Saturday.

In his news conference, Mr. Trump said that Venezuelan leaders must comply with the United States or else. “All political and military figures must realize that what happened to Maduro can happen to them,” he said.

Ms. Rodríguez’s speech also made clear that Mr. Maduro’s supporters — including her — still see him as the nation’s legitimate leader.

She repeatedly said that Mr. Maduro was Venezuela’s “only president” and even the text on Venezuelan state television labeled her as vice president. When she ended, the state broadcaster said that Ms. Rodríguez was the vice president who had just stated that Mr. Maduro was Venezuela’s president.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:13 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Aric Toler

A video shows three U.S. military helicopters flying over Caracas and headed westward toward Fuerte Tiuna, the largest military site in Venezuela. At the end of the video, at least one of the helicopters turns southward, and descends toward the military site.

The man filming the video gives a time of 1:58 a.m. Saturday. According to General Dan Caine in the news conference held at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, helicopters touched down to capture President Maduro in Caracas at 2:01 a.m.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:12 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Adam Sella

Protesters are dispersing after a nearly two hour protest outside the White House against the Trump administration’s capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.

The protesters, which numbered a couple hundred at its peak, held signs saying “U.S. out of the Caribbean” and “No Blood for oil.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:07 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Trump shares an image of Maduro blindfolded and handcuffed.

Pentagon reporter

The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee expressed shock and anger at President Trump’s decision to capture Nicolás Maduro and have the U.S. run Venezuela for the foreseeable future. “Trump clearly has no idea what comes next,” Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, said in a telephone interview. “How are we going to run Venezuela when we have no presence in the country. Where does this go?”

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:00 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Ashley Ahn

President Trump posted a photograph on social media on Saturday that he said was of the captured Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, on board a U.S. warship hours after the United States seized him in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.

The picture showed a man in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, blindfolded and handcuffed with a bottle of water in his right hand.

“Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima,” Mr. Trump captioned the photo, minutes before he addressed the nation from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, and announced that America was “going to run” Venezuela.

The U.S.S. Iwo Jima is an amphibious assault ship and one of the American warships that have been prowling the Caribbean in recent weeks; it brought aboard survivors of an American boat strike in October.

Mr. Trump made the post on Truth Social on Saturday before a news conference in which he discussed the American strikes that led to Mr. Maduro’s capture.

Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken from Caracas, the capital, by helicopter to the Iwo Jima, the president said in an interview with “Fox and Friends.”

“A nice flight,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m sure they loved it. But they’ve killed a lot of people.”

Mr. Maduro and his wife were en route Saturday to New York, where they will face indictments charging them with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.

The photo of what appears to be Mr. Maduro blindfolded and handcuffed was striking as it was the first photo of the captured leader made public after the attack. It came hours after Delcy Rodríguez, who had been Mr. Maduro’s vice president, demanded the United States provide proof that Mr. Maduro and his wife were still alive.

Mr. Trump said he and his team had watched the raid on video feeds as it occurred, subsequently posting what appeared to be photos of himself and other senior cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, watching the attack in real time.

Iconic photos documenting key moments in American military operations have often come from the Situation Room in the White House, where former President Barack Obama and his national security team observed the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, and Mr. Trump and his team monitored the operation that eliminated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former leader of the Islamic State, during his first term. Photos of those targets, who were both killed, were not released to the public.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:44 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Aimee OrtizHannah Ziegler and Yan Zhuang

Here’s what we know about the U.S. operation in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s ousted president, Nicolás Maduro, appeared before a judge in New York on Monday to face drug and weapons charges, two days after he was captured in a U.S. military raid on Caracas.

“I’m innocent. I’m not guilty. I am a decent man,” Mr. Maduro said in court through an interpreter. He added, “I am still president of my country.”

The fallout for Venezuela is still far from clear. The acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, raised the prospect of dialogue with the United States on Sunday — an apparent shift from the defiance that top Venezuelan officials had shown in the face of President Trump’s claim that the United States would “run” the country for the foreseeable future and reclaim American oil interests there.

The U.S. raid followed a monthslong campaign by the Trump administration to oust Mr. Maduro, an authoritarian leader.

Here’s what we know:

What happened?

The United States carried out “a large scale strike against Venezuela” in which Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured, Mr. Trump said.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that Mr. Trump ordered the operation late Friday. The mission involved 150 aircraft that worked to dismantle Venezuelan air defenses so military helicopters could deliver troops to Caracas, the country’s capital, he said.

The mission took about two hours 20 minutes and continued into early Saturday, when Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores “gave up,” General Caine said.

U.S. forces encountered significant resistance, Mr. Trump said. At least 80 people were killed, including military personnel and civilians, according to a senior Venezuelan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe preliminary reports. Cuban state media reported that 32 Cubans were killed in the U.S. attack. President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba said they were from Cuba’s armed forces or its interior ministry.

No Americans were killed, Mr. Trump said. Two U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said that about half a dozen soldiers were injured in the operation. Nearly 200 Special Operations forces took part in the raid, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Did Trump have the authority to capture Maduro?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a news conference on Saturday that it would not have been possible to inform U.S. lawmakers in advance of the strike. He and Mr. Trump described the mission as a law enforcement operation rather than a military action, which would have required greater congressional oversight.

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss the attack. António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said in a statement that he was “deeply concerned” that the United States had not respected the rule of international law. Trump administration officials also plan to brief leaders in Congress, after Democrats called on the administration to explain its legal justification for the raid and its plan for the region.

Mr. Maduro, a self-described socialist, had led Venezuela since 2013. The Biden administration accused him of stealing the 2024 election that kept him in power.

Who is in charge of Venezuela now?

The country’s new leader is Ms. Rodríguez. She was Mr. Maduro’s vice president, known as an economic troubleshooter.

Mr. Trump said on Saturday that the United States intended to “run the country” until a transition of power could take place. He said Ms. Rodríguez was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”

On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said the U.S. military would maintain a “quarantine” around Venezuela to prevent the entry and exit of oil tankers under American sanctions and to maintain “leverage” over the country.

Ms. Rodríguez, who has vacillated in her criticism of the Trump administration after the raid in Caracas, was formally sworn in on Monday. During the ceremony, she maintained that Mr. Maduro was the president and said she was pained by the “illegitimate military aggression” of Venezuela by the United States. Ms. Rodríguez described Mr. Maduro and his wife as hostages.

Separately, Venezuela’s main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has asked that her political ally, Edmundo González, be recognized as Venezuela’s president immediately.

In his own video statement on Sunday, Mr. González referred to himself as the president of Venezuela and called for political prisoners to be released.

What will happen to Maduro?

Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores were brought to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Monday. An unsealed indictment charged him with narco-terrorism, cocaine importation conspiracies and possession of machine guns — charges that would carry lengthy prison sentences if he were convicted. Ms. Flores is also charged in the cocaine conspiracy.

Mr. Maduro, speaking in Spanish, told the court that he had been “kidnapped,” and pleaded not guilty to all four counts against him. The next hearing is scheduled for March 17, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said.

His court appearance drew dozens of demonstrators — both critics and supporters of Mr. Maduro’s capture — who were separated by a metal barrier outside the courthouse.

The indictment appears similar to a 2020 indictment against Mr. Maduro that accused him of overseeing a violent drug organization known as Cartel de los Soles.

Analysts have said that Cartel de los Soles does not exist as a literal organization, and that the term has been used more broadly to describe the alleged involvement of high-ranking Venezuelan military officers in the drug trade. However, no evidence has been publicly disclosed showing Mr. Maduro directing the effort.

When the 2020 indictment was issued, the Trump administration set a $15 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Maduro. The Biden administration increased the bounty to $25 million in January 2025. The Trump administration then increased the reward in August to $50 million.

Amanda Holpuch, Alexandra E. Petri and Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:40 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Venezuela broadcasts messages of resistance from Maduro loyalists after the U.S. attack.

Reporting from Mexico City

Hours after President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were captured by U.S. forces, Venezuela’s state-run television was broadcasting rallies and protests taking place across several cities, including the capital, Caracas. Mr. Maduro’s supporters vowed to defend their country from what they described as an illegal attack and the kidnapping of their “legitimate” leader.

In interviews, residents and people close to Mr. Maduro’s government demanded the Trump administration to return him and the country’s first lady, Cilia Flores, safely to Venezuela.

The messages were broadcast entirely on state-run media programs. A free press does not exist in Venezuela because of years of government suppression and censorship.

Some people condemned the U.S. airstrikes that accompanied the capture of Mr. Maduro as a violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. Others were taking more direct action. In neighborhoods across Caracas and other cities, Venezuelans were seen in bulletproof vests activating local defense committees — groups essentially designed to turn every citizen into a soldier and every city block into a fortress.

“Everybody knows what they have to do,” said Pedro Infante, a high-ranking Venezuelan politician, as he was surrounded by supporters in a district of Miranda, one of the states hit overnight. “Prepare ourselves to defend our homeland and our sovereignty.”

Mr. Infante, who has been a central figure in both the legislative and executive branches under the governments of Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, accused the United States of wanting to steal Venezuela’s resources — specifically the country’s oil.

“Their fundamental interest is to gain control over our energy and resources” and “to have all the puppet governments on their knees,” he added.

Mr. Trump has said on several occasions that Venezuela stole oil and land belonging to the United States — referring to the nationalization of oil fields during which U.S. giants like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips lost assets.

In a rally near the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Jorge Luis Márquez, a local resident, told a state-run television program that he was startled in the early morning by the explosions, which he called a “criminal bombing” orchestrated by President Trump.

“The people here are outraged and demand that the world speak out against this crime committed by Donald Trump’s dirty, rotten boot, which trampled on sacred ground,” Mr. Márquez said.

By Saturday morning, Venezuelan authorities were claiming that some of the bombs had struck civilian buildings.

In a televised address from La Guaira, the capital city of a coastal state hit overnight by the U.S. airstrikes, Gov. José Alejandro Terán condemned what he called a “terrorist action by the United States government,” adding that civilians had been targeted. He did not mention any deaths but said that several people, including women and children, had been sent to the region’s hospitals and clinics.

Mr. Terán also said that the city’s historic center had been attacked and that “more than 10 missiles” had destroyed several warehouses at the port — arguably Venezuela’s most strategically vital maritime hub — where, he claimed, important medicines for patients with renal failure were stored.

“There is nothing left to prove to the entire world,” Mr. Terán said. “There has been a systematic attack to the civilian population.”

In a live broadcast from Caracas, Erika Farías, a political organizer and a member of Mr. Maduro’s party, warned both the United States and the Venezuelan opposition that she and many others would not give in despite the attack on Saturday.

“To the empire, we say: Venezuela’s oil is ours, and return Nicolás Maduro to us,” Ms. Farías said. “And to the stateless traitors, we say: Prepare yourselves, because the people have just moved from unarmed struggle to armed struggle — and we are going to defend our freedom, our independence and our sovereignty in the streets.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:32 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Maia Coleman

The family of James Luckey-Lange, a 28-year-old from Staten Island, N.Y., who is among the Americans who have been recently imprisoned in Venezuela, said they had not received any information about his whereabouts or been contacted by U.S. officials since the strikes on the country this morning.

“I remain hopeful and confident that the administration will prioritize the safety of the Americans over there,” Abbie Luckey, his aunt, said in a brief phone interview. Of the likelihood that the capture of President Maduro would hasten his return, she said: “I am more hopeful than I was 24 hours ago.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:32 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Here’s what to know about the Venezuelan oil industry Trump says he will revive.

Pentagon reporter

The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee lambasted President Trump’s plan to run Venezuela. “This is ludicrous,” said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island. “No serious plan has been presented for how such an extraordinary undertaking would work or what it will cost the American people. History offers no shortage of warnings about the costs — human, strategic, and moral — of assuming we can govern another nation by force.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:28 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Stanley Reed

Reporting from London

Venezuela

303 billion barrels

Saudi Arabia

267 billion barrels

Nearly half of the world’s proven oil reserves are in 12 countries in the Middle East.

Canada

159 billion barrels

United States

81 billion barrels

Russia

80 billion barrels

Libya

48 billion barrels

Nigeria

38 billion barrels

Note: Data shows estimates of proven oil reserves for 2025.

Source: Oil & Gas Journal.

Venezuela’s oil industry would “make a lot of money” with the United States behind it, President Trump said Saturday in a news conference to confirm the capture of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who is facing federal drugs and weapons charges.

He said the Venezuelan oil industry had been “a total bust,” for a long time, adding, “They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.”

Mr. Trump appears to be counting heavily on U.S. intervention in the oil industry to help transform Venezuela, a proposition that could prove to be complicated and expensive.

How much oil does Venezuela produce?

Venezuela claims to have more than 300 billion barrels in the ground, the largest reserves of oil of any country. But it struggles to produce about one million barrels a day, or around 1 percent of global production.

In addition, much of Venezuela’s oil is extra heavy, making it polluting and expensive to process.

Venezuela’s yearly oil production

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The New York Times

What is the state of the oil industry in Venezuela?

The industry has seen some recovery in recent years, but output is well below the more than two million barrels a day that Venezuela was producing in the early 2010s.

The national oil company, known as PDVSA, lacks the capital and expertise to increase production. The country’s oil fields are run down and suffer from “years of insufficient drilling, dilapidated infrastructure, frequent power cuts and equipment theft,” according to a recent study by Energy Aspects, a research firm. The United States has placed sanctions on Venezuelan oil, which is now exported primarily to China.

Are any Western oil companies involved there?

Chevron is the main Western oil company still operating in the country and produces about a quarter of Venezuela’s oil. Early in this century, when other companies were forced out, Chevron stayed, figuring that conditions might eventually improve.

Roughly half of Chevron’s production is exported to the United States.

On Saturday, Chevron said it was trying to ensure the safety of its employees and its operations in the country after Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were arrested and removed in the U.S. military action.

The oil giant, based in Houston, has conducted operations in Venezuela since 1923 and has maintained five onshore and offshore production projects there.

“With more than a century in Venezuela, we support a peaceful, lawful transition that promotes stability and economic recovery,” said Kevin Slagle, a Chevron spokesman. “We’re prepared to work constructively with the U.S. government during this period, leveraging our experience and presence to strengthen U.S. energy security.”

Later on Saturday, Chevron said it had given an incorrect statement and issued a new one that removed mention of the U.S. government, saying: “We continue to operate in full compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.”

What would U.S. control of the country’s oil production mean?

In theory, if U.S. oil companies were given greater access in Venezuela, they could help gradually turn the industry around. “But it’s not going to be a straightforward proposition,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects.

Analysts say increasing Venezuelan production will not be cheap. Energy Aspects estimated that adding another half a million barrels a day of production would cost $10 billion and take about two years.

Major increases might require “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years,” the firm said.

The overthrow of the Venezuelan government may offer opportunities for American oil companies, but they could also find themselves dragged into a messy situation, industry analysts say.

Pressure from Mr. Trump could “force them to play a quasi-governmental role on the capacity building and development front,” Helima Croft, head of commodities at the investment bank RBC Capital Markets, wrote on Saturday in an investment note.

She added that reducing military influence over the oil industry and the broader economy “could prove challenging.”

How will this affect oil prices?

Mr. Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is bound to send jitters through the oil markets, but analysts say that a major price jump is unlikely.

Venezuela is a relatively small producer and many analysts calculate that the oil market is currently oversupplied. Brent crude, the international benchmark, traded at $60.80 a barrel on Friday, near its lows for the year.

After Washington conducted its operation to remove Mr. Maduro, Third Bridge, a research firm, said in a note that it “did not see these events immediately impacting the price of crude oil or the cost of gasoline drivers see at the pump.”

Rebecca Elliott, Ivan Penn and Lazaro Gamio contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:28 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s new president on Saturday, but it was clear that Nicolás Maduro’s supporters — including her — still see him as the nation’s legitimate leader. She repeatedly said that Maduro was Venezuela’s “only president” and even the text on Venezuelan state television labeled her as vice president. When she ended, the state broadcaster immediately said that Rodríguez was the vice president who had just made clear that Maduro was Venezuela’s president.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:24 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

“There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” Rodríguez said to thundering applause.

She added that Venezuela was open to having a respectful relationship with the Trump administration, but only within the framework of international and Venezuelan law. “That is the only type of relationship I will accept, after they have attacked and militarily assaulted our beloved nation,” she said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:17 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Maria Abi-Habib

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, put on a display of force and unity in a live address to the nation, sitting with powerful military officials and other key government leaders as she denounced the United States. As she introduced each figure on live television, they nodded toward her in a show of deference as she demanded that Maduro was the rightful president of Venezuela. The display of force and unity undermined President Trump’s earlier comments that Washington would work with Rodríguez to run Venezuela.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:17 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, was defiant as she spoke on live television.“If there is one thing that the Venezuelan people and this country are clear about,” she said, “it is that we will never again be slaves, that we will never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:16 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, speaking in an address to the the nation, said Washington “launched an unprecedented military aggression” that “constitutes a terrible stain on the development of bilateral relations.” She said that with the invasion, “the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective: regime change in Venezuela. This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources. This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:13 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, is delivering an address to the nation and taking a much more defiant tone than President Trump suggested. Trump said she had agreed to help the United States run Venezuela. She said the United States invaded Venezuela under false pretenses and that President Maduro is Venezuela’s “only president.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:10 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Ivan Penn

Chevron, one of the leading private oil companies in Venezuela, said it was working to ensure the safety and security of its people and operation in the country after the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The oil company, based in Houston, has conducted operations in Venezuela since 1923 and has maintained five onshore and offshore production projects in the country. “With more than a century in Venezuela, we support a peaceful, lawful transition that promotes stability and economic recovery,” said Kevin Slagle, a Chevron spokesman. “We’re prepared to work constructively with the U.S. government during this period, leveraging our experience and presence to strengthen U.S. energy security.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:08 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

In Catia la Mar, a city just west of the Caracas airport, the air strikes hit a three-story civilian apartment complex, knocking out an exterior wall and killing at least one older woman, the victim’s family said.

The woman, Rosa González, died in the strike and a second person was seriously wounded, the family said. One woman in the building said she was hit and nearly lost her eye. Another person, a 70-year-old man named Jorge who declined to give his last name, said he “lost everything” when the bomb exploded.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:41 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Representative Majorie Taylor Greene, just days before she is expected to resign from Congress, accused President Trump of walking away from his promise to end overseas wars. “Americans’ disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it, and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going,” Greene, a one-time Trump ally, posted on social media. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:37 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Maia Coleman

In his first public break with President Trump since taking office two days ago, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City condemned the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, calling it “an act of war” and “violation of federal and international law.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:29 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William Rashbaum

With President Nicolás Maduro and his wife en route to New York, the next step in their case will come in federal court in Manhattan. They are expected to appear before a U.S. District Court judge in New York City on the four-count narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking indictment unsealed on Saturday morning. In similar cases, the defendants have been flown to Stewart Air National Guard Base, about 72 miles north of the city, and brought to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. While it is unclear when they will arrive, security will undoubtedly be tight. It is also unclear whether the Venezuelan leader and his wife are yet represented by defense lawyers.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:25 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

Even though General Caine did not identify the helicopter unit involved in the operation in Caracas, U.S. officials said it was the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which flies modified MH-60 and MH-47 helicopters. The 160th, nicknamed the Night Stalkers, specializes in high-risk, low-level, and nighttime missions like insertions, extractions and raids. The unit has conducted what the Pentagon calls training missions near the coast of Venezuela in recent months.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:24 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Stephen Hiltner

Several U.S. airlines, including Delta, American and Southwest, began cancelling flights to the Caribbean on Saturday morning, in compliance with airspace closures from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:22 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Glenn Thrush

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the extraction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela was a “law enforcement” operation, yet the attorney general, Pam Bondi, who has not shied away from the spotlight, was a notable no-show at the news conference announcing what is, arguably, the most significant prosecution of her tenure.

Bondi spent the night and early morning hours watching live feeds inside a secure facility at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, not far from her home, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of her whereabouts who requested anonymity because of a lack of authorization to discuss the matter publicly. It is not clear if Bondi, who has access to government aircraft, would have had time to fly to New York, which takes around three hours.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:20 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Vice President JD Vance briefly met with President Trump at the president’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., during the day on Friday to discuss the impending strikes, but did not go to Mar-a-Lago that night, a spokesman said. The reason was the national security team worried a late-night motorcade movement by the vice president might tip off the Venezuelans.” Instead the vice president joined a secure video conference through the night to monitor the operation. He traveled to Cincinnati after the operation concluded and was not at Trump’s news conference.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:11 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Megan Mineiro

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the capture of Maduro was “entirely inconsistent” with what top officials told top lawmakers in closed-door briefings in recent weeks.

“Because the president and his cabinet repeatedly denied any intention of conducting regime change in Venezuela when briefing Congress, we are left with no understanding of how the Administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation,” she said in statement.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:08 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jazmine Ulloa

Adelys Ferro, co-founder of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, a grassroots group representing Venezuelans in the United States, said asylum petitions and immigration proceedings for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans remain suspended. For them, the situation is particularly fraught. They have tried to prove that they have been targets of the Maduro regime in U.S. immigration courts, she said, but at the same time, the Trump administration has cast them as criminals and lawbreakers who should be deported.

“We are victims of the Nicolás Maduro regime, but we are also victims of the Trump administration policies,” she said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:01 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Foreign leaders reacted with shock and skepticism to the U.S. capture of Maduro.

Reporting from Venezuela

Delcy Rodríguez has been sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president in a secret ceremony in Caracas on Saturday, according to two people close to the government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears for their safety. Rodríguez is President Nicolás Maduro’s vice president.

Jan. 3, 2026, 1:00 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Steven Erlanger

Steven Erlanger covers diplomacy in Europe and beyond and wrote from Berlin.

Despite the long American military buildup around Venezuela, the American raid on Caracas to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife produced initial reactions of shock, outrage and skepticism from international leaders, many of them troubled by an exercise of American gunboat diplomacy.

The reactions were particularly angry from Latin America and from leaders who are more on the left and who have struggled with President Trump and his trade, tariff and other policies in the region. Allies of Mr. Maduro, including Cuba and Russia, predictably condemned the American intervention, despite Russia’s own invasion of sovereign Ukraine nearly four years ago. And some, like a senior Mexican official, said that Mr. Trump was simply after Venezuela’s large oil deposits.

Shortly after President Trump announced that the United States would “run the country," European leaders appeared to largely support the end to Mr. Maduro’s rule and were more cautious to criticize Mr. Trump’s intervention.

President Emmanuel Macron of France wrote on X that the Venezuelan people could “only rejoice” at the end of Mr. Maduro’s dictatorship, and did not address the U.S. approach. Before Mr. Trump’s announcement, however, the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, wrote on social media that the military operation “violates the principle of non-resort to force that underpins international law.”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was particularly scathing. He condemned the U.S. action and said it recalled “the worst moments of interference in the politics” of the region.

“The bombings on Venezuelan territory and the capture of its president cross an unacceptable line,” Mr. Lula wrote on social media. “These acts represent a grave affront to Venezuela’s sovereignty and yet another extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community.”

And President Gabriel Boric of Chile, a leftist whose term is coming to an end, also condemned the intervention. “We express our concern and condemnation of the military actions by the United States taking place in Venezuela, and we call for seeking a peaceful solution to the serious crisis affecting the country,” he said on social media. Like many, he called for dialogue to resolve the crisis.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, a Maduro ally, denounced “a criminal attack” by the United States and called for “urgent reaction” from the world.

Russia said that it supported the leadership of Venezuela and called for an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the American intervention.

Iran, which has also been threatened in the last few days by Mr. Trump, issued a statement on Saturday condemning the U.S. attack and accusing the United States of violating the United Nations Charter.

But Mr. Trump had supporters in the region, too. President Javier Milei of Argentina celebrated the capture of Mr. Maduro. “Liberty advances,” he wrote on X.

And Prime Minister Kamla Susheila Persad-Bissessar of neighboring Trinidad and Tobago, who drew criticism for her support of Mr. Trump’s military buildup against Mr. Maduro in the name of combating drug trafficking, emphasized that her country played no role in the American operation and maintains peaceful relations with Venezuela.

The Mexican government “condemned energetically” Washington’s unilateral military action in Venezuela, warned of regional instability and urged dialogue, according to a statement from the country’s foreign ministry. “Mexico makes an urgent call to respect international law, as well as the principles and purposes of the U.N. Charter, and to cease any act of aggression against the Venezuelan government and people,” read the statement, which was posted on X by President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico.

Gerardo Fernández Noroña, the former president of Mexico’s Senate and an influential leader of the country’s governing Morena party, said the U.S. actions were aimed at taking control of Venezuela’s oil. “President Maduro has not been captured; he was deprived of his liberty through a military intervention by the United States government,” Mr. Fernández Noroña said on social media. “He is a prisoner of war. They seek through this to subdue the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in order to seize its natural resources.”

Canada, which like Mexico has a tense relationship with the Trump administration and faces a difficult year of trade negotiations ahead, stopped short of condemning the U.S. actions in Venezuela.

The Europeans were similarly circumspect. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said she had spoken to Secretary of State Marco Rubio about events in Venezuela. “The EU is closely monitoring the situation in Venezuela,” she wrote in a social media post. “The EU has repeatedly stated that Mr. Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition. Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be respected. We call for restraint. The safety of EU citizens in the country is our top priority.”

Spain, with its close ties to Latin America, offered to mediate in the crisis in an attempt to broker a negotiated and peaceful solution. “Spain calls for de-escalation and restraint,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that it was prepared to support a “democratic, negotiated, and peaceful solution.”

As news emerged of the U.S. intervention, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain was also cautious to take an outright position, saying “I will want to talk to the president” and to allies to “establish the facts.” After Mr. Trump’s announcement, he wrote on X that the U.K. shed “no tears” about the end of Mr. Maduro’s regime and would “discuss the evolving situation with US counterparts” in hopes of a peaceful transition.

The Europeans have been mostly consumed with Ukraine and helping President Volodymyr Zelensky refine a peace proposal that would satisfy Mr. Trump and then be presented to Russia, which has already made it clear that it is unacceptable in current form. On Saturday, the national security advisers of the main European countries were in Kyiv on that matter, which is of more strategic importance to the Europeans than the fate of Mr. Maduro.

Ukraine itself largely supported the actions of Mr. Trump. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha argued that Ukraine defended “the right of nations to live freely, free of dictatorship, oppression and human rights violations.” He accused Mr. Maduro’s government of having “violated all such principles in every respect.”

Perhaps the most interesting criticism of Mr. Trump came from Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential candidate of France’s far right National Rally party, which has received support from Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

“No one will miss” the Maduro regime, Mr. Bardella said on social media. “That said, respect for international law and the sovereignty of states cannot be applied selectively,” he added. “The forcible overthrow of a government from the outside cannot constitute an acceptable response, only exacerbating the geopolitical instability of our time.”

In the face of such intervention, he added, France must “rearm our nation, to strengthen our industrial and military capabilities,” in order to “make its independent voice heard on the international stage, one that respects sovereignties.”

Reporting was contributed by Ana Ionova, Annie Correal, Simon Romero, Genevieve Glatsky, Emma Bubola, Maria Abi-Habib, Jason Horowitz, Lizzie Dearden, Jeanna Smialek, Leily Nikounazar, Matina Stevis-Gridneffand Pranav Baskar.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:50 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump’s news conference raises many questions. Who exactly will be running Venezuela, as he stated the United States would do for a period of time? Trump indicated there will be a U.S. military presence in Venezuela “as it pertains to oil.” What will that look like and how many U.S. troops could be deployed?

Amid all the questions, Trump did make clear one thing: This military operation was not just about ousting a leader accused of drug trafficking, but also about expanding U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:49 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

That was one of the most consequential news conferences of Trump’s two presidential terms, but it remains unclear what will follow.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:46 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump’s news conference has concluded. The biggest takeaway, of course, is Trump’s announcement that the United States would “run” Venezuela, and the lack of details about how that will work. But it’s also striking how much the president focused on oil and how central that will be to how the United States runs the country.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:38 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

Asked about the potential presence of U.S. forces in Venezuela, Trump said that there would be a “presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:34 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump has made various comments during this news conference showing that this military operation was at least in part about gaining more access to oil in Venezuela.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:33 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

When asked how running Venezuela follows Trump’s long-stated goal of putting “America First,” the president said, “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:32 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

When asked how much running Venezuela, potentially for years, will cost, Trump said: “It won’t cost us anything.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:31 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump says that Rubio has spoken to the newly sworn-in Venezuelan president and she has said she would support what they are doing.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:30 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

Trump’s suggestion that Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would help the United States run the country was stunning because it came just as Venezuelan state television was playing a clip of her denouncing the U.S. military operation.

“Faced with this brutal situation and this brutal attack, we do not know the whereabouts of President Nicolás Maduro and first lady Cilia Flores,” Rodríguez said, according to a clip played by Venezuelan state television on Saturday. “We demand immediate proof of life for President Maduro and the first lady from the government of President Donald Trump.”

But Trump just told reporters that Marco Rubio had spoken with her with a different result. “She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:29 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Asked why running a country elsewhere in the Americas is “America First,” Trump said, “I think it is,” citing the need for oil and energy. It’s worth recalling his quote to The Atlantic in which he said that America First is whatever he says it is.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:29 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump says Rubio and Hegseth will be a “team” working with the people of Venezuela to run Venezuela for this uncertain period of time. It’s unclear who those Venezuelans will be.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:28 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump has long had an interest in procuring the oil of other countries, including during his first term.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:28 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Asked how long the United States would occupy Venezuela, Trump said, “I’d like to do it quickly, but it takes a period of time.” He said that the United States would be selling Venezuelan oil to China and other nations.

“We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries,” Trump says.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:26 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump is demonstrating how much this effort is about securing access to oil. When asked about the timeline for the U.S. involvement in the country, he immediately turned to rebuilding oil assets.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:26 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Maria Abi-Habib

President Trump indicated that Vice President Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn in as president of Venezuela. But earlier on Saturday, Rodríguez denounced Washington’s military actions and Maduro’s capture.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:25 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

Asked about the mixed results of U.S. intervention and sponsorship of coups in Latin America, Trump said, “Not with me.”

“We have a perfect record of winning,” he added.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:24 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Pressed by reporters on who would be running Venezuela, Trump points to his advisers standing behind him and says that for a “period of time” the “people that are standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it.”

Some of the advisers standing behind him include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Trump said the United States would be a part of an unspecified “group” running Venezuela without providing details.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:22 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Rubio said this was not the kind of mission for which you could give Congress notice in advance. He said it was “largely a law-enforcement” operation.

But Trump quickly stepped in. “Congress has a tendency to leak,” Trump said, before adding that “they knew we were coming.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:19 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have” them, Trump said. This is the opposite of what his administration has repeatedly said its posture is.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:19 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

“We are going to run the country right,″ Trump said as he turned to oil. “It’s going to make a lot of money.” Then he added, about past Venezuelan governments, “they stole our oil.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:18 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Asked who’s running Venezuela, Trump said “a group” and immediately turned to the oil industry. He said oil companies would be paying to rebuild the infrastructure.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:17 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said that Nicolás Maduro could have left Venezuela and been living in another country, but “he wanted to play big boy.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:17 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump’s statement that “we are going to run the country,” is remarkable for a president who led a political campaign largely opposed to prolonged overseas conflicts and regime changes.

The statement has prompted many operational questions over how exactly the United States will assert control over Venezuela. Who exactly will be running the nation and for how long?

The statement alone also raises political questions over whether this operation undercuts a campaign promise central to his political identity and support.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:14 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

While Trump said the United States would run Venezuela, some of Maduro’s top deputies were still on Venezuelan state television on Saturday slamming the United States.

Venezuela’s defense minister and attorney general, as well as several governors, all gave defiant statements, calling for an international rejection of the U.S. military operation and saying they still ran the country. State TV has also shown numerous small pro-Maduro rallies from around the country.

Trump said Venezuelan leaders must comply with the United States or else. “All political and military figures must realize that what happened to Maduro can happen to them,” he said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:12 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

General Caine said another team of helicopters was called in to extract Maduro and his wife, and took fire along the way. He said the whole operation happened over about two hours and 20 minutes.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:11 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

General Caine said that U.S. warplanes dismantled Venezuelan air defenses so that American military helicopters could go into Caracas. “One of our aircraft was hit but remained flyable,” Caine said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:09 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

General Caine says the youngest crewmember was 20, the oldest 49, and the military force was followed by an “extraction force” to get Maduro.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:07 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the mission drew on decades of experience fighting terrorists in the Middle East, Southwest Asia and Africa.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:06 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Caine said this operation involved 150 aircraft launching across the hemisphere, in some of the most detailed description the U.S. government has given so far.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:05 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military mission in Venezuela was launched as part of a request from the Justice Department. He said the operation was named “Absolute Resolve.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:03 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonah Bromwich

The indictment charging Maduro in Manhattan does not reflect the accusations that Trump just lobbed at the Veneuzuelan president about his ties to Tren de Aragua. Though the leader of the gang, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, is one of the defendants, the indictment does not appear to explicitly tie him to Maduro, instead accusing him more generally of working with members of the Venezuelan government.

Jan. 3, 2026, 12:01 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

In declaring that the U.S. will be “running” Venezuela, the president has raised a host of questions: Will the United States have an occupying military force? Will it install a pliant government for some number of years? Will it run the courts, and determine who pumps the oil? All of this, of course, could enmesh the United States in the kind of “forever wars” Trump’s MAGA base has rejected.

Trump did talk at some length about bringing in American oil companies to remake the energy infrastucture and, presumably, regain rights it once held to exploit the oil reserves.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:58 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

There are no signs of U.S. military presence in the country and the United States closed the embassy in Caracas in 2019, so it is unclear how the Trump administration would run Venezuela, as the president claims.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:56 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

As he justifies the military operation in Venezuela, Trump argued that Maduro sent members of Tren de Aragua to the United States to terrorize American communities. Trump’s own intelligence community earlier this year undercut that claim, finding that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:55 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump has offered no details about what the United States running Venezuela looks like. Will there be an American official placed there in a leadership position?

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:53 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump has segued from talking about the Venezuela operation to talking about crime in Washington, falsely claiming there have been no murders in Washington, D.C., in the last seven months (and the National Guard has only been there since mid-August).

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:52 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

For all the rationales the Trump administration gave about trying to curtail illegal drug trafficking, this effort to knock Maduro out of power amounted to regime change, a fact that Trump is not masking in this news conference.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:48 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump referred to a “partnership” between Venezuela and the United States, which he said would make Venezuelans “rich, independent and safe.” Of course, this was a partnership accomplished by a government overthrow.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:48 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

“We were prepared to do a second wave” after the first attack, Trump said but ultimately it was not necessary because of the success of the first. He added that the United States was ready to do so in the future if needed.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:47 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump put no time limit on the American occupation. It would be up to the United States to decide when to return the country to Venezuelan control. And then he turned to oil, saying that American companies would fix the infrastructure, “and start making money for the country.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:46 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

“We are going to run the country until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said, suggesting an occupation. The United States has done this before, in Germany, in Japan, and of course Iraq. But the history is checkered.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:45 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

What comes next in terms of Venezuelan leadership is unclear, Trump said, the United States would be in charge until there is a clear safe transition. He emphasized it three times.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:44 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

“We are going to run the country,” Trump said of Venezuela. He said he did not want the Maduro regime to continue with another leader.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:43 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

“They knew we were coming,″ Trump said, arguing the Venezuelan military was quickly overwhelmed. “Not a single American service member was killed,″ he said, though earlier he suggested there were casualties.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:42 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump suggested the United States turned off the power in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. He didn’t say how, but either a direct physical attack on the grid, or a cyberattack, would be the most likely method.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:42 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump opens by saying “overwhelming American military power” was used, from “air, land and sea” to seize Maduro, and he also compared it to other operations he ordered, including the attack in June on Iran’s nuclear sites. He contends that “no other nation” could pull off this kind of operation.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:41 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

White House reporter

Trump began his Mar-a-Lago news conference saying the Venezuela operation was a force the likes of which hadn’t been seen since World War II. Trump, who has been awake virtually all night, looks and sounds fatigued.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:40 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump is surrounded by a number of his national security officials: Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Dan Caine, John Ratcliffe and Stephen Miller. Steve Witkoff and Kash Patel are also on the room but standing off to the side.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:37 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee praised Maduro’s capture. “This arrest was the culmination of a monthslong effort by the Trump administration to degrade the narco-terrorist organizations that Maduro oversaw,” said Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of MIssissippi. He called on the administration for a briefing as soon as possible to hear from senior military and law enforcement leaders about the operation.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:32 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump just posted a photo on Truth Social that he said is of Maduro aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima. The picture shows Maduro in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants. He is blindfolded and handcuffed and has large headphones on.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:27 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

President Trump says he watched the capture of Maduro in real time.

Mexico City bureau chief

As President Trump prepares to speak about the U.S. military operation in Venezuela, there is quite a split screen with Venezuelan state television. The main government channel is broadcasting a pro-Venezuela rally in Cuba, where speakers are denouncing Trump as a dictator, with an all-caps chyron that says: “The empire kidnapped them. We want them back.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:18 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt

Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington. Tyler Pager reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.

In August, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers slipped into Venezuela with a plan to collect information on Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, whom the Trump administration had labeled a narco-terrorist.

The C.I.A. team moved about Caracas, remaining undetected for months while it was in the country. The intelligence gathered about the Venezuelan leader’s daily movements — combined with a human source close to Mr. Maduro and a fleet of stealth drones flying secretly above — enabled the agency to map out minute details about his routines.

It was a highly dangerous mission. With the U.S. embassy closed, the C.I.A. officers could not operate under the cloak of diplomatic cover. But it was highly successful. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that because of the intelligence gathered by the team, the United States knew where Mr. Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept.

That information was critical to the ensuing military operation, a pre-dawn raid Saturday by elite Army Delta Force commandos, the riskiest U.S. military operation of its kind since members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan in 2011.

The result was a tactically precise and swiftly executed operation that extracted Mr. Maduro from his country with no loss of American life, a result heralded by President Trump amid larger questions about the legality and rationale for the U.S. actions in Venezuela.

Mr. Trump has justified what was named Operation Absolute Resolve as a strike against drug trafficking. But Venezuela is hardly as big a player in the international drug trade as other countries. Officials had previously told congressional leaders that their objective in Venezuela was not regime change. And Mr. Trump has long said he opposes U.S. foreign occupations.

Yet on Saturday, the president proclaimed that American officials were in charge of Venezuela, and that the United States would rebuild the country’s oil infrastructure.

In contrast to messy U.S. interventions of the past — by the military in Panama or the C.I.A. in Cuba — the operation to grab Mr. Maduro was virtually flawless, according to multiple officials familiar with the details, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plans.

In the run-up, Delta Force commandos rehearsed the extraction inside a full-scale model of Mr. Maduro’s compound that the Joint Special Operations Command had built in Kentucky. They practiced blowing through steel doors at ever-faster paces.

The military had been readying for days to execute the mission, waiting for good weather conditions and a time when the risk of civilian casualties would be minimized.

Amid the heightened tensions, Mr. Maduro had been rotating between six and eight locations, and the United States did not always learn where he intended to stay until late in the evenings. To execute the operation, the U.S. military needed confirmation that Mr. Maduro was at the compound they had trained to attack.

In the days leading up to the raid, the United States deployed increasing numbers of Special Operations aircraft, specialized electronic warfare planes, armed Reaper drones, search-and-rescue helicopters and fighter jets to the region — last-minute reinforcements that analysts said indicated the only question was when military action would happen, not if.

The United States had made other moves intended to ratchet up the pressure on Mr. Maduro and prepare for the raid to capture him. A week earlier, the C.I.A. had carried out a drone strike on a port facility in Venezuela. And for months, the U.S. military has conducted a legally disputed campaign that has destroyed dozens of boats and killed at least 115 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

In recent days, Mr. Maduro tried to head off an American raid, offering the United States access to Venezuelan oil, Mr. Trump said Saturday. A U.S. official said the deal, offered on Dec. 23, would have had Mr. Maduro leave the country for Turkey. But Mr. Maduro angrily rejected that plan, the official said. It was clear, the official added, that Mr. Maduro was not serious.

The collapse of the talks set the stage for the capture mission, which culminated with Mr. Maduro flown to the United States and jailed in Brooklyn to face federal drug trafficking charges.

There was likely little doubt in the Venezuelan government that the United States was coming. But the military took pains to maintain so-called tactical surprise, like it did with its operation over the summer to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Mr. Trump had authorized the U.S. military to go ahead as early as Dec. 25, but left the precise timing to Pentagon officials and Special Operations planners to ensure that the attacking force was ready, and that conditions on the ground were optimal.

The U.S. military wanted to conduct the operation during the holiday period because many government officials were on vacation and because significant numbers of Venezuelan military personnel were on leave, according to a U.S. official.

Unseasonably bad weather pushed the operation off by several days. Earlier in the week, however, the weather cleared, and military commanders looked at a “rolling window” of targeting opportunities in the days ahead. Mr. Trump gave the final go order at 10:46 p.m. Friday.

Had the weather not cleared, the mission could have been pushed off until mid-January, one official said.

The operation officially got underway around 4:30 p.m. on Friday, when U.S. officials gave the first set of approvals to launch certain assets into the air. But that did not mean the full mission would be authorized. For the next six hours, officials continued to monitor the conditions on the ground, including the weather and Mr. Maduro’s whereabouts.

Mr. Trump spent the evening on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, where he had dinner with aides and cabinet secretaries. The president’s aides told him that they would be calling him later that evening, around 10:30 p.m., for the final approval. Mr. Trump did so by phone, then joined his senior national security officials in a secure location on the property.

Inside Venezuela, the effort began with a cyberoperation that cut power to large swaths of Caracas, shrouding the city in darkness to allow the planes, drones and helicopters to approach undetected.

More than 150 military aircraft, including drones, fighter planes and bombers, took part in the mission, taking off from 20 different military bases and Navy ships.

As the aircraft advanced on Caracas, military and intelligence agencies determined that they had maintained tactical surprise: Mr. Maduro had not been warned that the operation was coming.

Early Saturday morning, thunderous explosions boomed across Caracas as U.S. warplanes struck at radar and air defense batteries. While some of the explosions posted on social media looked dramatic, a U.S. official said that they were mostly radar installations and radio transmission towers being taken out.

Later, General Caine told reporters that the fighter planes, bombers and drones came into Venezuela to find and destroy the country’s air defenses, to clear a safe pathway for the helicopters carrying Special Operations forces.

Even though Venezuelan air defenses were suppressed, the U.S. helicopters came under fire as they moved in on Mr. Maduro’s compound at about 2:01 a.m. local time. General Caine said the helicopters responded with “overwhelming force.”

One of the helicopters was hit. Two U.S. officials said that about half a dozen soldiers were injured in the overall operation.

The Delta Force operators assigned to capture Mr. Maduro were whisked to their target — on Venezuela’s most fortified military base — by an elite Army Special Operations aviation unit, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which flies modified MH-60 and MH-47 helicopters.

The 160th, nicknamed the Night Stalkers, specializes in high-risk, low-level and nighttime missions like insertions, extractions and raids. The unit conducted what the Pentagon called training missions near the coast of Venezuela in recent months.

Once on the ground, Delta Force moved quickly through the building to find Mr. Maduro. About 1,300 miles away, in a room inside Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump and key aides watched the raid play out in real time, courtesy of a camera positioned on an aircraft overhead.

As General Caine narrated the events on the screen, the president peppered him with questions about how the operation was unfolding.

“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News Saturday morning.

As the president monitored the raid from Florida, the Delta Force operators used an explosive to enter the building.

The U.S. official said that the Special Operations forces took three minutes after blowing open the door to move through the building to Mr. Maduro’s location.

Mr. Trump said that once the Special Operations forces made it through the compound to Mr. Maduro’s room, the Venezuelan leader and his wife tried to escape into a steel-reinforced room, but were stopped by the U.S. forces.

“He was trying to get to a safe place,” Mr. Trump said during the news conference with General Caine, adding: “It was a very thick door, a very heavy door. But he was unable to get to that door. He made it to the door, he was unable to close it.”

About five minutes after entering the building, Delta Force reported that they had Mr. Maduro in custody.

The military was accompanied by an F.B.I. hostage negotiator in case Mr. Maduro had locked himself in a safe room or refused to surrender.

Those negotiations, however, proved unnecessary. The Delta operatives swiftly loaded the couple into the helicopters, which had returned to the compound. By 4:29 a.m. Caracas time, Mr. Maduro and his wife were transferred to the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, a U.S. warship in the Caribbean stationed about 100 miles off the coast of Venezuela during the operation.

The couple was transferred from the Iwo Jima to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, where the F.B.I. had a 757 government plane waiting to bring him to a military-controlled airport north of Manhattan.

Mr. Trump watched until the Special Operations forces were out of Venezuela, flying over the ocean, an official said.

Mr. Trump said that the United States was prepared to conduct a second wave of attacks against Venezuela, but that he did not think it would be necessary. He issued a warning to other Venezuelan leaders: He would be willing to come after them, as well.

Reporting was contributed by Anatoly Kurmanaev and Mariana Martínez from Venezuela, Riley Mellen from New York and Carol Rosenberg from Miami.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:18 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Ruth Igielnik

Before this operation, Americans largely did not support the idea of U.S. military activity in Venezuela. Just 25 percent of voters nationally — and about half of Republicans — supported military action in Venezuela, according to a December poll from Quinnipiac University.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:17 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Isabela Espadas Barros Leal and Genevieve Glatsky

A timeline of the rising tension between the U.S. and Venezuela.

President Trump on Saturday announced the capture of the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, in a U.S. military operation that appeared to be the culmination of a campaign against Mr. Maduro by the president and other top American officials.

Mr. Maduro’s capture came after months of deadly U.S. strikes on supposed drug-carrying boats, the seizure of two tankers carrying Venezuelan oil and a U.S. military buildup off the South American country’s shores.

Here are some of the events that led to the breakdown in relations between the United States and Venezuela, and the effort to force Mr. Maduro from power.

March 2020: During Mr. Trump’s first term, the Justice Department indicted Mr. Maduro in a narco-terrorism and cocaine-trafficking conspiracy in which, prosecutors said, he helped lead a violent drug cartel that lasted for decades. Mr. Maduro condemned the charges, denying any involvement with drug trafficking.

July 2024: After a vote riddled with irregularities, Mr. Maduro was declared the winner of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. Independent monitors said the election was marred by fraud and that an opposition leader, Edmundo González, was its legitimate winner.

January 2025: The Biden administration recognized Mr. González, who had fled Venezuela after the election and was living in exile in Spain, as the legitimate leader of Venezuela as part of an effort to further isolate Mr. Maduro.

July: The Trump administration added Cartel de los Soles, which it described as a “Venezuela-based criminal group,” to a list of global terrorist groups and declared that Mr. Maduro was its leader. The Treasury Department said that Cartel de los Soles “provided material support” to Tren de Aragua, another cartel linked to Venezuela that the administration had designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

The administration treats Cartel de los Soles as an organized group, but some experts on Latin American crime characterize it as a network of corruption in Venezuela’s military and government.

Also in July, Mr. Trump signed a secret order directing the American military to use force against Latin American drug cartels that his administration identified as terrorist organizations.

August: The Pentagon began dispatching warships, fighter jets and thousands of troops into the Caribbean near Venezuela, increasing tensions in the region.

Aug. 7: Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the United States government had increased its reward for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Maduro to $50 million.

Sept. 2: Mr. Trump ordered a deadly strike on a Venezuelan boat that he claimed was carrying “terrorists” who were members of Tren de Aragua over international waters. Mr. Maduro later called the strike, which killed 11 people, a “heinous crime” and said the United States should have captured those onboard if they were believed to have been transporting drugs.

The American military struck two other small vessels in September, killing six more people, including one who was said to be a Colombian citizen. The strikes have been widely criticized as illegal.

Sept. 4: Two Venezuelan F-16 fighter jets flew over American warships in the Caribbean in a show of force after the first deadly boat strike, a move the Pentagon described as “highly provocative.”

Sept. 6: Mr. Maduro sent a letter to Mr. Trump insisting that his country did not export drugs. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later said that the White House had seen the letter but that it did not change the administration’s position on Venezuela.

Oct. 2: Mr. Trump instructed Richard Grenell, who is a special presidential envoy and the president of the Kennedy Center, to stop all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela. Mr. Grenell had been trying to negotiate a deal with Mr. Maduro that would have secured U.S. companies’ access to Venezuelan oil.

Oct. 8: Republicans in the Senate rejected a resolution to bar Mr. Trump from using military force against boats in the Caribbean Sea.

Oct. 15: Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela, telling reporters that the administration was “certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control.” The Venezuelan government said it would raise the matter with the United Nations Security Council.

Oct. 16: The U.S. military carried out a strike on a semisubmersible vessel in the Caribbean Sea, killing two men on board. Two other men were rescued by the U.S. military and repatriated within days to Colombia and Ecuador.

Oct. 17: The U.S. military said it killed three men and destroyed another boat it suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean Sea, this one alleged to have been affiliated with a Colombian insurgency group. It was the seventh boat known to have been attacked since early September.

Oct. 21: The United States struck a vessel that American officials suspected of carrying drugs in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia, expanding the Trump administration’s campaign past the Caribbean Sea. The strike killed two or three people, a U.S. official said. A second Pacific strike announced a day later killed three more people.

Oct. 23: Mr. Trump said at a news conference that he would not seek congressional approval for military strikes against drug cartels. “I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” Mr. Trump said, adding: “I think we are going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?”

Oct. 24: The Pentagon announced that the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford and its accompanying warships and attack planes would be deployed to waters near Latin America. It came one day after two Air Force B-1 bombers flew near Venezuela.

Oct. 27: Another round of strikes on vessels in the Pacific killed 15 people. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initially said one person had survived, but he was presumed dead after Mexican officials failed to find anyone in the water.

Oct. 31: María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s de facto opposition leader — who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October — told Bloomberg News that she had “no doubt that Nicolás Maduro, Jorge Rodríguez and many others are the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including the U.S.” The comments, which have been widely debunked, were criticized by former diplomats as well as critics of Mr. Maduro for seeming to provide justification for a potential invasion by the United States.

Nov. 2: Mr. Trump said in an interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that he doubted the United States would go to war with Venezuela but would not fully rule out the possibility of land strikes. He accused Venezuela of treating the United States “very badly” and, when asked if Mr. Maduro’s days in office were numbered, said, “I would say yeah.”

Nov. 6: The United States struck a boat in the Caribbean, killing three people. That strike came after two others on the first week of November, one in the Caribbean and one in the Pacific, that killed five people.

Nov. 12: The United States carried out its 20th strike against the purported drug cartels. The strike killed four people and brought the total known death toll to 80.

Nov. 28: The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump and Mr. Maduro had spoken late the previous week, in a phone call that also included Mr. Rubio. The leaders discussed a possible meeting in the United States, though no plans were announced.

Nov. 29: Mr. Trump said on social media that the airspace “above and surrounding Venezuela” should be considered “closed in its entirety.” The president has no authority over Venezuelan airspace, but his post was expected to deter airlines from flying to the country.

Dec. 2: Mr. Hegseth addressed mounting concerns about the legality of the first strike on a Caribbean vessel, citing “the fog of war” in response to questions about whether the U.S. military committed a war crime when it killed two survivors of that attack in a second strike. Mr. Hegseth said he did not personally see survivors of the first strike and that Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of the operation, ordered the second strike.

Dec. 4: A strike in the Eastern Pacific killed four people at a moment of heightened scrutiny over the legality of the U.S. military’s campaign, and nearly two weeks since the previous boat attack.

Dec. 10: Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. had seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. U.S. officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks, asserting that they were part of the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken Mr. Maduro’s government by undermining its oil market. One of the officials said that though the ship was carrying Venezuelan oil, it was seized because of its past links to smuggling illicit Iranian oil.

Dec. 11: Ms. Machado appeared in Oslo hours after missing the ceremony that awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize. Her emergence after more than a year in hiding thrust the opposition back onto the global stage at a volatile moment in U.S.-Venezuela relations. That same day the U.S. imposed new sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector and on relatives of Mr. Maduro while moving to block tens of millions of dollars’ worth of oil aboard the seized oil tanker.

Dec. 15: The U.S. military struck three boats in the Eastern Pacific, killing eight people, in one of the deadliest days of the campaign. The military said the boats were traveling along a known narco-trafficking route.

Dec. 16: Mr. Trump ordered a “complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela. In a social media post, Mr. Trump said Venezuela was “completely surrounded” by a growing U.S. naval presence, sharply escalating his efforts to disrupt the country’s oil exports. The move prompted Mr. Maduro to dispatch naval escorts for oil shipments sailing toward Asia.

Dec. 17: An attack in the Eastern Pacific killed four people in a strike the military said was carried out at the direction of Mr. Hegseth. The House rejected two resolutions that would have required Mr. Trump to seek congressional approval before attacking Venezuela and continuing the strikes.

Dec. 18: The military carried out two more strikes on boats in the Eastern Pacific, killing five people.

Dec. 19: Mr. Trump nominated Lt. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, a marine with extensive special operations and Middle East experience, to lead the U.S. Southern Command after the abrupt retirement of Adm. Alvin Holsey, who reportedly objected to the administration’s lethal boat strikes.

Dec. 20: The U.S. Coast Guard tried to intercept the Bella 1, a stateless tanker under U.S. sanctions, for past Iranian oil shipments. Personnel on the ship did not allow it to be boarded and the vessel fled northeast into the Atlantic while broadcasting distress signals.

The Coast Guard also stopped and detained the Centuries, a Panamanian-flagged vessel carrying Venezuelan oil for a China-based trader. It was unclear how long the United States intended to detain the Centuries, as American authorities did not have a warrant to take possession of it.

Dec. 22: The U.S. military said a strike in the eastern Pacific targeted a boat that had been transporting drugs along known trafficking routes. One person was killed.

Dec. 23: Over several days, the U.S. military intensified operations in the Caribbean, sending multiple C-17 transport flights from bases across the country and Japan to Puerto Rico.

Late December: In the first known U.S. operation inside Venezuela, the C.I.A. carried out a drone strike on a port facility sometime during the fourth week of December, likely on Dec. 24. The strike hit a dock purportedly used for shipping narcotics and it did not kill anyone, people briefed on the operation said. News of the strike first came to light on Dec. 26, when Mr. Trump said in a radio interview that the U.S. had destroyed “a big facility” as part of its campaign against Venezuela.

Dec. 29: A strike on a boat in the Eastern Pacific killed two people, according to the U.S. Southern Command. The command said on social media that the boat was engaged in “narco-trafficking operations.”

Dec. 30: Three people were killed aboard one boat during strikes on three boats traveling in a chain, according to the U.S. Southern Command, which announced the operation a day later.

Dec. 31: The U.S. military killed five people in a strike on two boats, the Southern Command said. The command did not provide further information about the boats’ location.

As of Dec. 31, at least 115 people had been killed in 35 boat strikes since Sept. 2.

Jan. 2: President Trump announced on social media that the United States had captured Mr. Maduro and was flying him out of Venezuela. Mr. Trump’s announcement came hours after the start of coordinated U.S. strikes on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and other parts of the country. The strikes killed at least 80 people, according to a senior Venezuelan official.

Jan. 3: Mr. Maduro arrived in New York, where he and his wife were indicted on federal drug trafficking and weapons charges and held in a Brooklyn jail. Mr. Trump said in a news conference shortly after the announcement of Mr. Maduro’s capture that the United States would “run” Venezuela, though Mr. Maduro’s aides appeared to still be in power after the attack.

Jan. 4: After top Venezuelan officials fiercely condemned the U.S. attack, the country’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, struck a more conciliatory tone, asserting Venezuela’s right to sovereignty but offering to work on a “cooperative agenda” with the United States. Still, Mr. Trump reiterated his claim to have direct control over the country, saying the United States was “in charge” of Venezuela.

Jan. 5: Mr. Maduro and his wife pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other federal charges during their arraignment at a federal courthouse in Manhattan. Mr. Maduro told the judge he had been kidnapped. “I’m innocent. I’m not guilty. I am a decent man,” he said through an interpreter. He added, “I am still president of my country.”

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:10 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William Rashbaum

The new indictment tracks President Nicolás Maduro’s rise through the ranks of the Venezuelan government, accusing him of committing the crimes charged in the indictment every step of the way. “Since his early days in Venezuelan government, Maduro Moros has tarnished every public office he has held,” the indictment charged, using Maduro’s full Spanish surname. “As a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Maduro Moros moved loads of cocaine under the protection of Venezuelan law enforcement.”

The indictment continues: “As Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maduro Moros provided Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela. As Venezuela’s President and now-de facto ruler, Maduro Moros allows cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime, and for the benefit of his family members.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:03 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Vice President JD Vance justifies Maduro’s capture as bringing him to justice.

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

We are inside the Tea Room at Mar-a-Lago awaiting the president’s news conference.

Jan. 3, 2026, 11:01 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Adam Sella

Reporting from Washington

Vice President JD Vance justified the U.S. operation that captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, as legal and necessary, praising it in a social media post on Saturday.

“PSA for everyone saying this was ‘illegal’: Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism. You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas,” he said, referring to the Venezuelan capital.

Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s leader since 2013, has denied U.S. accusations that he controls drug trafficking groups.

Mr. Vance added that “the president offered multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.”

The “stolen oil” referred to a view within the administration that Venezuela illegally took American oil fields through nationalization.

The U.S. operation inside Venezuela to capture the country’s leader is the latest in a series of escalations. The United States has bombed suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, has declared a blockade on some oil tankers coming to and from Venezuelan ports, and has seized or pursued several tankers.

While Mr. Vance has not been as vocal in the administration’s campaign against Venezuela as Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have played key roles in it. Still, the vice president has regularly proved to be a stalwart defender of the administration.

In early September after the U.S. first struck a boat the administration said was trafficking narcotics, killing 11, Mr. Vance said on social media that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:54 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Farnaz Fassihi

United Nations bureau chief

Venezuela’s mission to the U.N. has requested an emergency Security Council meeting and has asked the Council to condemn the U.S. military strikes against the country.

Venezuela’s ambassador, Samuel Reinaldo Moncada Acosta, said in a letter to the Council’s president: “The United States of America always uses lies to fabricate wars. It is an international tyranny imposed with the propaganda of death: the recent past confirms this.” Russia and China, allies of Venezuela and permanent members of the Council, have requested the Council convene an emergency meeting this weekend.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:47 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Trump didn’t seek congressional authorization to capture Maduro, and some lawmakers are concerned.

María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, posted a statement on social media, calling for national unity following the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

“Given his refusal to accept a negotiated exit, the government of the United States has fulfilled its promise to enforce the law,” she wrote. “We have struggled for years, we have given it our all, and it has been worth it. What had to happen is happening.”

Machado added that Edmundo González, who the U.S. has recognized as Venezuela’s President-elect, must “immediately” take office and be recognized as the country’s commander of the armed forces.

“Today we are prepared to enforce our mandate and take power,” Machado said. “We are going to restore order, release the political prisoners, build an exceptional country, and bring our children back home.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:47 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William Rashbaum

A judge in the Southern District of New York has unsealed the new indictment against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, which opens by saying that for 25 years the leaders of Venezuela have “abused their positions of public trust and corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import tons of cocaine into the United States.” The charges are the same as in the 2020 indictment, though there is more political rhetoric.

There are four counts in both indictments, including narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine and possession of machine guns, which, when combined with drug trafficking charges, carries a potentially lengthy prison sentence. Both indictments name six defendants, but the new one includes Maduro’s wife and son. It also names the minister of the interior, Diosado Cabello Rondon, who was charged before. It also adds two new defendants, while dropping three others who had been charged in 2020.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:46 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Annie Karni

Reporting from Washington

Republicans in Congress on Saturday cheered the Trump administration’s dramatic military action to capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, but top Democrats sounded alarms about the legality of the operation and said they would seek a quick vote to halt hostilities without express authorization.

The surprise nighttime operation — and President Trump’s declaration on Saturday that he planned to “run” Venezuela and use the U.S. military to guard its oil resources — all but guaranteed that lawmakers returning to Washington next week would instantly confront an intense debate about the situation.

That promised the latest test of whether the Republican-controlled House and Senate, which have deferred constantly to the president, would try to reassert any of their power in an election year.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said he would push for a vote next week on a war powers resolution to limit Mr. Trump’s ability to take further military action without explicit authorization by Congress.

Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had “blatantly” lied to Congress in recent briefings when they said the administration’s objective in Venezuela was not regime change.

Mr. Kim, a former national security official in the Obama administration, called the move to oust Mr. Maduro “disastrous,” arguing that it would further isolate the United States on the global stage.

“Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war,” he wrote on social media.

At a morning news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., the president indicated that he had purposefully skipped informing members of Congress before taking action in Venezuela because he did not trust lawmakers to keep his plans confidential.

“Congress has a tendency to leak,” Mr. Trump said.

And after Mr. Trump said at the same news conference that the United States would now “run” Venezuela, Mr. Schumer warned that such an idea “should strike fear in the hearts of all Americans.”

He called on the administration to immediately brief Congress on its plan “to prevent a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster that plunges us into another endless war or one that trades one corrupt dictator for another.”

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, also called for a briefing, demanding that the Trump administration immediately present to Congress “compelling evidence to explain and justify this unauthorized use of military force.”

The House and the Senate are set to return to Washington next week after a long holiday break.

But Mr. Schumer said on Saturday afternoon that the administration had not responded to any request from congressional leaders for an immediate briefing.

“They have not given us any details and have not gotten back to us,” Mr. Schumer said during a conference call with reporters. “They kept everyone in the total dark.”

Most congressional Republicans rallied around the president’s action, in keeping with the extraordinary deference they have shown to Mr. Trump even as he has trampled over congressional prerogatives and contradicted his promises to extricate the United States from foreign conflicts.

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said Mr. Maduro’s capture was “an important first step to bring him to justice for the drug crimes for which he has been indicted in the United States.” He called the operation a “decisive action” by Mr. Trump.

Speaker Mike Johnson called the operation “decisive and justified,” and said in a statement that the Trump administration was “working to schedule briefings for members as Congress returns to Washington.”

But even some Republicans gently pressed for more answers from the Trump administration.

“I look forward to hearing more about the Administration’s plans for a positive transition in the days ahead,” Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, said online, while also praising the military personnel who carried out the capture of Mr. Maduro.

And others said the operation ran counter to Mr. Trump’s “America First” promises.

“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Republican from Georgia who is set to vacate her position as lawmakers return to Washington, wrote in a lengthy social media post. “Boy were we wrong.”

Many Democrats called Mr. Maduro’s apprehension good news, but said the way in which it was done raised serious questions.

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat who represents a district in which Venezuelan immigrants cheered the news, said that Mr. Maduro’s capture was “welcome.” But she added: “I’ll demand answers as to why Congress and the American people were bypassed in this effort. The absence of congressional involvement prior to this action risks the continuation of the illegitimate Venezuelan regime.”

At least one Democratic candidate running for office in this year’s midterm elections was quick to condemn Republicans in Congress for having failed to stand up to Mr. Trump when they could have, helping to set the stage for what they called an unauthorized large-scale strike on Venezuela.

Graham Platner, a veteran and a progressive Democrat running for Senate in Maine, noted that Senator Susan Collins, the Republican he is challenging, voted with most members of her party against a Senate resolution to block the president from invading Venezuela without congressional authorization. “From Iraq to Venezuela, you can count on Susan Collins to enable illegal foreign wars,” he wrote online.

And the top Democrats on the national security, intelligence and armed services committees all condemned the action even as they denounced Mr. Maduro.

“Last night, President Trump waged war on a foreign nation without authorization, without notification, and without any explanation to the American people,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “Whatever comes next, President Trump will own the consequences.”

At least one Republican expressed concern early Saturday about the operation, but later said he was satisfied with the explanation that Mr. Rubio had given him in a phone call. In an initial post on Saturday morning, Mr. Lee said he wanted to know “what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action” in the absence of congressional authorization for military force.

But in a second post hours later, Mr. Lee wrote that Mr. Rubio had told him that Mr. Maduro had been “arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.” He added: “This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.”

Mr. Lee also said that Mr. Rubio “anticipates no further action in Venezuela now that Maduro is in U.S. custody.”

That post came hours before Mr. Trump told reporters that the United States would effectively be running Venezuela and that a U.S. military presence would remain there “as it pertains to oil.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:39 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

The C.I.A. had a group of officers on the ground in Venezuela working clandestinely beginning in August, according to a person familiar with the agency’s work. The officers gathered information about Maduro’s “pattern of life” and movements that was important as the U.S. developed intelligence about his whereabouts and movements.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:31 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez is in Caracas, according to three people close to her. Rodríguez is next in line to assume power, according to Venezuelan constitution. She remains the ruling party’s choice to succeed Maduro, said a fourth person, a senior Venezuelan official. The United States has called Mr. Maduro’s government illegitimate, and it’s unclear if the White House would accept Rodríguez as president.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:30 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

When asked on Fox News if the attack in Venezuela were intended as a warning to President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, Trump seemed to signal they might. “Well, it wasn’t meant to be,” he replied. “We’re very friendly with her, she’s a good woman. But the cartels are running Mexico — she’s not running Mexico.”

Trump said Sheinbaum had repeatedly declined his offers to intervene against the cartels. “I’ve asked her numerous times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’” he said, adding that “something is going to have to be done with Mexico.”

His comments came even after his own officials have lauded Mexico for an unprecedented surge in cooperation, citing a record number of cartel arrests and successful fentanyl seizures.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:28 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Maduro’s inner circle appeared to survive the U.S. strikes on Venezuela.

Mexico City bureau chief

In an interview with Venezuelan state television, Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, called on Venezuelans to take to the streets against the U.S. military action in the country. “We are going to show the world what we are made of,” he said. State television has been broadcasting footage of small pro-Maduro rallies on Saturday.

Saab also demanded the United States produce proof that Maduro is alive, and he called on international organizations to denounce Maduro’s capture. “Before the world, I ask the United Nations at this moment to speak out. Where are the international human rights organizations?” he said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:26 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonah Bromwich

U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi has posted the unsealed indictment of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. At first glance, it appears quite similar to the 2020 indictment of the Venezuelan leader, charging him with narco-terrorism and cocaine importation conspiracies. The charges also include possession of machine guns. When combined with drug trafficking charges, those gun charges carry strong prison sentences upon conviction.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:10 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Christopher Buckley

The Chinese foreign ministry said in response to the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro that it is “deeply shocked and strongly condemns the U.S. for recklessly using force against a sovereign state and targeting its president.” The ministry also said that the U.S. actions “seriously violate international law, violate Venezuela’s sovereignty, and threaten the peace and security of Latin America and the Caribbean.” A Chinese delegation visited with Maduro hours before his capture, according to photos posted on social media by the Venezuelan president.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:09 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Simon Romero and Anatoly Kurmanaev

Simon Romero reported from São Paulo, Brazil, and Anatoly Kurmanaev reported from Venezuela.

The United States captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. But Mr. Maduro’s inner circle appeared on Saturday morning to have survived the U.S. strikes on the country, though it was not immediately clear who was in power.

Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who is next in the presidential line of succession, figured among the Venezuelan officials issuing pronouncements or making public appearances after U.S. strikes on targets in the country.

While reports circulated that Ms. Rodríguez was in Russia at the time of the attacks, Ms. Rodríguez is in Caracas, according to three people close to her. Russian state media also denied reports that she was in Moscow.

Other top Maduro allies who appeared to survive the attacks included Vladimir Padrino López, the defense minister and Venezuela’s top ranking military officer; and Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister and one of Mr. Maduro’s top enforcers.

The survival of these officials suggests that Venezuela’s government remains functioning, at least shakily, in the hours after Mr. Maduro and the first lady were seized and extracted from the country.

If Mr. Maduro’s inner circle does remain intact and at the helm of Venezuela’s institutions, that also raises questions as to what happens next.

A war game run during President Trump’s first term assessed what may follow if Mr. Maduro were ousted, forecasting chaotic power struggles as military units, rival political factions and guerrilla groups vie for control of the country.

It is unclear how the intervention will influence the Venezuelan opposition’s ambitions to exercise power. Edmundo González, a retired diplomat, is considered the legitimate winner, by a wide margin, of a presidential election in 2024.

Unable to take office after the vote, Mr. González fled to Spain, ceding the spotlight to María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who had been barred from running and who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Trump appeared hesitant to throw his support behind Ms. Machado.

“Well, we have to look at it right now,” he said on Fox News on Saturday morning when asked if he would support her. “They have a vice president, as you know. I mean, I don’t know about what kind of an election that was, but, you know, the election of Maduro was a disgrace.”

Mr. Trump also suggested that his administration would continue to target Venezuelan government officials if they side with Mr. Maduro.

“If they stay loyal, the future is really bad, really bad for them,” he said.

Speaking by telephone on state television, Ms. Rodríguez, the vice president, invoked what she described as Mr. Maduro’s “instructions,” and called on the people and the armed forces to defend Venezuela.

Ms. Rodríguez also asked Mr. Trump to provide proof that Mr. Maduro is alive and condemned the U.S. intervention as an act of “military aggression” that violated the country’s sovereignty.

Educated partly in France, Ms. Rodríguez spearheaded a market-friendly overhaul which had provided, before the U.S. military campaign targeting Mr. Maduro, a semblance of stability in Venezuela’s economy after a prolonged collapse.

Her older brother, Jorge Rodríguez, another member of the inner circle who is the president of the National Assembly and Mr. Maduro’s chief political strategist, shared a statement on Telegram from Ms. Rodríguez calling the intervention a plot to seize Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Separately, Mr. Cabello, the interior minister, appeared on state television and urged Venezuelans to support Mr. Maduro’s government. While allied with Mr. Maduro, Mr. Cabello is also viewed as an internal rival in Venezuela’s power structures.

Mr. Cabello, a retired military figure, is at the helm of Venezuela’s repression apparatus. As a hard-liner with a caustic political style, his public profile had been on the rise as the U.S. intensified its campaign against Venezuela in recent weeks.

The defense minister, Mr. Padrino López, also appeared on state television after the U.S. attacks, calling them an act of “criminal military aggression.” He is known as a survivor of political upheaval in Venezuela, holding his role for the last 11 years.

Genevieve Glatsky contributed from Bogotá, Colombia, and Jack Nicas from Mexico City.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:07 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, appeared to endorse the capture of Nicolás Maduro, writing on X that “all the narco chavista criminals, your time is coming,” and voicing support for Venezuelan opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia.

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:07 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Robert Jimison

Reporting on Congress

Jan. 3, 2026, 10:03 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Megan Mineiro

Senator John Thune, the Republican majority leader, said the U.S. capture of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, was “an important first step to bring him to justice for the drug crimes for which he has been indicted in the United States.” He called the operation a “decisive action” by President Trump.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:57 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Valerie Hopkins

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:56 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Farnaz Fassihi

United Nations bureau chief

United Nations secretary general António Guterres said in a statement that he was alarmed by the events in Venezuela on Saturday and warned that the U.S. military action there would have wider implications for the region. “Independently of the situation in Venezuela, these developments constitute a dangerous precedent,” he said, calling for international law to be respected.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:40 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

Trump suggested on Fox News that his administration would continue to target Venezuelan government officials if they side with Maduro. “If they stay loyal, the future is really bad, really bad for them,” he said. “I’d say most of them have converted.” Several top Venezuelan officials criticized the U.S. action on Venezuelan state television on Saturday.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:39 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

President Trump said to an interviewer on Fox News that he and his team had watched the raid on video feeds as it went down. He said he saw the U.S. military team break through steel doors in “a matter of seconds.” “I’ve never seen anything like it actually,” he said. He added no American troops were killed but then suggested some were injured when their helicopter was hit.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:34 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Trump said on Fox News that Maduro and his wife had been taken to the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, one of the American warships that have been prowling the Caribbean. Survivors of one of the boat strikes were also taken to the Iwo Jima.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:32 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Speaking to Fox News, President Trump declined to throw his support behind Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Well, we have to look at it right now,” he said on Fox News when asked if he will support her. “They have a vice president, as you know. I mean, I don’t know about what kind of an election that was, but, you know, the election of Maduro was a disgrace.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:30 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

In South Florida, Venezuelans were partying to celebrate Maduro’s capture.

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump brushed off concerns about the legality of the U.S. operation in Venezuela. When asked about criticism from Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the president said Democrats were “weak, stupid people.”

“They should say great job,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “They shouldn’t say ‘Oh, gee, maybe it’s not constitutional.’ You know the same old stuff that we’ve been hearing for years and years and years.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:29 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Patricia Mazzei

Reporting from Doral, Fla.

The party broke out before sunrise in the heavily Venezuelan city of Doral, Fla., west of Miami. Venezuelans and Venezuelan Americans blared music, honked car horns and danced to celebrate the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader.

“Viva Venezuela libre!” one man waving a Venezuelan flag yelled as he drove by El Arepazo, a Venezuelan arepa shop in a gas station where Venezuelans often gather for political or sporting events.

South Florida is home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States — about 40 percent of Doral’s residents are of Venezuelan origin — and a vast majority of them are opposed to Mr. Maduro. Millions of people have left Venezuela in recent years because of economic chaos and political repression in the country.

Some of Doral’s Venezuelan residents immigrated more than two decades ago. Others are more recent arrivals. Many of them watched anxiously over the last few months as President Trump escalated his threats and boat strikes against Venezuela, and they wondered how it would all turn out.

“I can’t believe it,” said Mariannys Milano, 45, as she wiped away tears outside El Arepazo early on Saturday morning. She had hardly slept, she said, after calling and texting relatives in eastern Venezuela all night. “I have so many emotions. I feel like throwing up. I feel joy.”

Several people said they were anxious about what would follow with Mr. Maduro out of power, though they all said they were optimistic. No one wanted any member of Mr. Maduro’s government to remain in office, though his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as interim president on Saturday.

“The good thing is that they took out Maduro,” said Abner Márquez, 27, of Lake Worth. “Now we have to see who in the government is going to take power, and what they are going to do.”

Many in Doral said they preferred that the U.S. lead a transition that would result in turning the government over to Edmundo González, the diplomat who outpolled Mr. Maduro in a presidential election in 2024 by a margin of more than 2 to 1, according to the Venezuelan opposition’s vote count, but was not allowed to take power.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Tibisay Mejía, 51, who immigrated to the United States in 2015. “But this is the beginning.”

Jesús Naranjo, 57, said that although he does not like Mr. Trump generally, he enthusiastically approved of his administration’s removal of Mr. Maduro.

“I support his actions toward Venezuela,” said Mr. Naranjo, who left Venezuela in 1998, the same year that Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was elected president. Mr. Trump, he said, “had the courage to do what had to be done.”

“If the United States lends a hand,” Mr. Naranjo added, “things should work democratically.”

Revelers in Doral said they had deep faith in María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October. They said they expected her to work closely with the Trump administration to lead a transition.

“She’s not just winging it,” said Yajaira Molina, 52. “I believe in Maria Corina Machado as much as I do in the American government’s strategy.”

In nearby Key Biscayne, a wealthy community with many longtime Venezuelan immigrants, people gathered at the Golden Hog, an upscale deli and market, to celebrate.

“We’re better off than we were yesterday,” María Carolina Jaso said at a church market a few blocks away. “It was either in the hands of criminals or in the hands of unpredictable Trump.”

Some 1,200 miles north in the New York City borough of Queens, people gathered at the Budare Café in Jackson Heights. Among them was Sebastián Sánchez, 26, who had a Venezuelan flag tied around his neck like a cape as he ate a pabellón arepa and sipped black coffee.

“Today this food is for celebrating,” he said. “It’s typical Venezuelan food and it’s a very special day. Living here in the United States, I am very privileged, but my family came here looking for that freedom that we didn’t have in our country, so seeing that there is a new future in Venezuela makes me very happy.”

The celebratory mood in Doral persisted for most of the day. At one point, a couple of hundred people stood in the middle of the gas station, which was closed for business and guarded by police officers, to sing traditional Venezuelan songs and the Venezuelan and American national anthems. Some people ducked into a neighboring convenience store to pick up coffee or the occasional celebratory beer. So many people crowded outside later that the arepa shop and the store had to lock their doors and admit people only one at a time.

“We’ve been waiting for this for so many years,” said Alejandra Arrieta, 55, of Doral.

People held video calls with Venezuelan relatives and live-streamed the celebration, wishing one another a happy new year with a feeling that sounded different from what it might have been on Jan. 1.

Councilman Rafael Pineyro of Doral, a Venezuelan American who immigrated to Miami when he was 15, said he was visiting relatives in Orlando when he heard the Maduro news at about 1:30 a.m. Saturday. He scrambled back to Doral, where the city had spent several weeks, Mr. Pineyro said, preparing for the possibility of residents’ spilling into the streets if the United States took military action in Venezuela.

Mr. Pineyro, a Republican, said that Venezuela “needs help from the U.S. government, 100 percent,” to move on after Mr. Maduro’s removal.

What a transition in power might look like, or how it would take place, remains in question, he said, but he added that the remaining members of Mr. Maduro’s government would be wise to “come to the right side of history.”

José Anka, 57, said that Ms. Rodríguez, the interim president, “is going to have to do what the U.S. wants.”

As the day went on, more people arrived at the gas station, often with their entire families and dogs in tow. Several brought Trump signs or wore “Make America Great Again” hats.

Florida Republicans began seriously courting Venezuelan American voters after Mr. Trump’s first presidential election in 2016. Miami’s influential Cuban American politicians, in particular, embraced Venezuelan Americans, seeing them as ideologically aligned because both groups had fled from left-wing regimes. Republicans had already won over many Venezuelan Americans with hard-line rhetoric and actions against Mr. Maduro, even before his capture on Saturday.

Some people in Doral waved Cuban flags and said that they hoped Cuba’s communist regime would be the next to fall, now that Mr. Maduro was gone and his government could no longer help prop up Cuba’s flailing economy.

“I feel this as if it were my own country,” Yasier Hernández, 40, who is from Cuba, said as he wept at the sight of Venezuelans celebrating. “Tomorrow, it will be our turn.”

When Mr. Trump began speaking at a news conference in Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach, some 75 miles to the north, a hush fell over the crowd in Doral. Small groups gathered in twos and threes and strained to listen on their phones. A few people knelt around a loudspeaker. Some people listened to a Spanish translation of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

Some in the crowd tuned him out before he was done. But the street party kept going, a parade of honking cars filling Doral well into the afternoon.

David C. Adams contributed reporting from Key Biscayne, Fla., and Raúl Vilchis from New York.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:28 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William Rashbaum

An earlier indictment in 2020 had charged that President Nicolás Maduro and several Venezuelan officials “participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy between the Cartel de Los Soles and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia,” the armed Columbian group known as FARC.

At the time, the U.S. attorney general, William Barr, said that the Venezuelan regime was “plagued by criminality and corruption” and that “Maduro and a number of high-ranking colleagues” had conspired with the FARC to smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States. Others charged in the 2020 indictment included Venezuela’s Minister of Defense, its chief Supreme Court justice and two FARC leaders.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:20 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

At La Carlota Air Base in Caracas, burned husks of military vehicles could be seen hours after the United States struck the military installation along with other targets across the country.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:17 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

The C.I.A. had a source inside Maduro’s government to help track him.

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

In an interview on Fox News, Trump said that Maduro wanted to negotiate in the final days before U.S. forces captured him but the American president said he rejected that offer. “I didn’t want to negotiate,” he said. “I said, ‘Nope, we got to do it.’”

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:14 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Robert Jimison

Reporting on Congress

A number of Republican lawmakers who represent districts in Southern Florida with large Venezuelan-American constituencies were celebrating the capture of Presdient Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. “Today’s decisive action is this hemisphere’s equivalent to the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” Representative Carlos Gimenez said in a social media post. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart praised President Trump’s “decisive leadership,” and Representative Maria Salazar said it was time for “the rightful leaders of Venezuela to restore freedom and rebuild the nation.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:09 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt

A C.I.A. source within the Venezuelan government monitored the location of Nicolás Maduro in both the days and moments before his capture by American special operation forces, according to people briefed on the operation.

The American spy agency, the people said, produced the intelligence that led to the capture of Mr. Maduro, monitoring his position and movements with a fleet of stealth drones that provided near constant monitoring over Venezuela, in addition to the information provided by its Venezuelan sources.

It is not clear how the C.I.A. recruited the Venezuelan source who informed the Americans of Mr. Maduro’s location. But former officials said the agency was clearly aided by the $50 million reward the U.S. government offered for information leading to Mr. Maduro’s capture.

In his confirmation hearing last year, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, promised he would lead a more aggressive agency, one willing to conduct covert operations to both collect information and advance American policy. President Trump authorized the C.I.A. to take more aggressive action last fall, and then in November approved planning and preparation for a series of operations in Venezuela.

In late December, the C.I.A. used an armed drone to conduct a strike on a dock that U.S. officials believed was being used by a Venezuelan gang to load drugs on to boats.

One of the people briefed on Mr. Maduro’s capture said it was the product of a deep partnership between the agency and the military and involved “months of meticulous planning.” A senior U.S. official said that the C.I.A. and special operations analysts had Mr. Maduro “wired” — meaning precisely located — from early on in the planning of the operation.

While the C.I.A. played a critical role in planning and carrying it out, the mission was a law enforcement operation by the U.S. military’s special operation forces, rather than operation carried out under the agency’s authority.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:03 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonah E. BromwichWilliam K. Rashbaum and Benjamin Weiser

The governor of Sucre, about 325 miles east of Caracas, called for party militants to gather in the town square later in the day. The governor, Jhoanna Carrillo, appeared at the rally along with mayor Pedro Figueroa to show their loyalty to the president. “We demand that the entire world speak out against the threat and chaos they have tried to sow in our homeland,” Carrillo said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 9:01 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Bondi says Maduro and his wife to face a fresh indictment in Manhattan.

Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela captured in a military raid on Caracas, faces charges in the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors have targeted him for years.

The U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, posted the new indictment on social media on Saturday. It charges Mr. Maduro with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine, among other charges. His wife, Cilia Flores, is also charged in the cocaine conspiracy.

Mr. Maduro, the indictment said, “allows cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime and for the benefit of his family members.”

“The defendant now sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking,” it continued. “That drug trafficking has enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite.”

In an earlier post, Ms. Bondi said that Mr. Maduro and his wife would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” President Trump said that the couple was being brought to New York.

INDICTMENT

Read the Indictment Against Nicolás Maduro

The Venezuelan president was accused of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine, among other charges. His wife, Cilia Flores, was also charged.

Read Document 25 pages

Though the charges against Ms. Flores are new, Mr. Maduro was previously indicted in Manhattan in 2020 on similar allegations. With those charges pending, Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to Mr. Maduro last year as a “fugitive of American justice.”

The 2020 indictment said that Mr. Maduro had come to lead a drug trafficking organization, the Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, as he gained power in Venezuela. Cartel de los Soles has been an ironic nickname for the Maduro administration’s military officers, who wear suns on their epaulets.

The earlier indictment named six defendants. The one unsealed on Saturday also names six, but they are almost entirely different, including only two men from the earlier charges. They are Mr. Maduro and Diosdado Cabello Rondón, who is the minister of interior, justice and peace, a member of the armed forces and vice president of the ruling party.

The others charged include Mr. Maduro’s son, Nicolas Maduro, known as Nicolasito; a former minister of the interior and justice, Ramón Rodriguez Chacín; and Héctor Guerrero Flores, who prosecutors said was the leader of Tren de Aragua, a gang that the Trump administration designated last year as a foreign terrorist organization.

The inclusion of Mr. Guerrero Flores, who was indicted in a separate case last month, would appear to reflect the White House’s repeated assertion that Mr. Maduro worked with narco-terrorists, including Tren de Aragua. American intelligence agencies have disputed that conclusion.

The charges against Mr. Guerrero Flores do not tie him directly to Mr. Maduro, but rather to “members of the Venezuelan regime” and “an individual he understood to be working with” it.

Southern District prosecutors had long targeted Mr. Maduro, and the investigation that led to his 2020 indictment was overseen by Emil Bove III, a prosecutor who years later became one of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyers and whom the president this year appointed to the federal bench. One of the other prosecutors was Amanda Houle, who now leads the office’s criminal division.

The indictment says Mr. Maduro’s wife, Ms. Flores, along with her husband and other defendants, “partnered with narcotics traffickers and narco-terrorist groups” that were sending cocaine from Venezuela to the United States through countries like Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

It also says Ms. Flores attended a meeting in 2007 where she “accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to broker a meeting between a large-scale drug trafficker and the director of Venezuela’s national antidrug office, Néstor Reverol Torres.”

The trafficker later arranged to pay monthly bribes to the antidrug official, in addition to about $100,000 to ensure safe passage for each flight transporting cocaine — a portion was then paid to Ms. Flores, the indictment says.

Though the circumstances of Mr. Maduro’s capture in a military raid were extraordinary, the American legal system has experience in arresting South American leaders and putting them on trial. Manhattan prosecutors have a saying — “you can’t suppress the body” — meaning that once a person is in custody, a case tends to move forward regardless of the circumstances of the arrest.

In 1989, the United States invaded Panama and compelled the surrender of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama’s military leader, who was taken to Florida and arrested by agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Three years after his surrender, Mr. Noriega was tried, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

In 2022, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was arrested by law enforcement officials from his own country in connection with a U.S. extradition request. He, too, was brought to the United States, where he was tried, convicted and sentenced.

Late last year, Mr. Trump abruptly pardoned Mr. Hernández, saying that the case against him — which had also been overseen by Mr. Bove and had been built over several presidential administrations — “was a Biden administration setup.”

The case against Mr. Hernández and the 2020 charges against Mr. Maduro bear a significant resemblance. Both leaders were accused of using their governments as vehicles for the exporting of cocaine into the United States. And both were charged with conspiring to possess machine guns, which, combined with drug trafficking charges, carries potentially lengthy prison sentences.

Mr. Maduro’s 2020 indictment has been pending in the Manhattan federal court before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, a veteran of nearly three decades on the Southern District bench.

Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the judge is best known for overseeing the many lawsuits filed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, by families of the dead and workers at ground zero.

More recently, Judge Hellerstein, 92, has presided over Mr. Trump’s attempts to move his Manhattan criminal conviction into federal court, a matter that is pending.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:59 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

In his first comments since Maduro was captured, Vice President JD Vance applauded the success of the mission and defended its legality.

“Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” he wrote on social media. “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”

Vance added that Trump had offered “multiple off ramps” to Maduro. Trump had been adamant that “the drug trafficking must stop” and that “the stolen oil” had to be returned to the United States, Vance said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:58 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Saturday that while Maduro was an “illegitimate ruler” there was no evidence he posed a threat that justified military intervention. “Secretary Rubio repeatedly denied to Congress that the Administration intended to force regime change in Venezuela,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut said. “The Administration must immediately brief Congress on its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:56 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Frances Robles

Groups of armed apparent civilians have begun to hit the streets in Caracas, according to a journalist who saw them.

Several men in civilian clothes were seen just after daybreak guarding the Gen. Francisco de Miranda airbase outside of Caracas when the airstrikes hit.

Two pickup trucks filled with men wearing vests and civilian clothes carrying gas cans as well as both long weapons and handguns were seen unloading outside the Centro Comercial Ciudad Tamanaco, a shopping mall near the airbase.

Venezuela’s government has long used armed civilians, known as colectivos, to fight back against protesters.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:55 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Rebecca F. Elliott

Chevron, the largest private oil producer in Venezuela, declined to comment Saturday morning on the status of its operations in the country. “Chevron remains focused on the safety and wellbeing of our employees, as well as the integrity of our assets,” a spokesman said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:54 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

How tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela escalated.

It is not uncommon for federal prosecutors to return what is known as a superseding indictment to add additional defendants or charges to an existing indictment. In this case, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s post on X suggests that a new indictment would add Maduro’s wife as a new defendant. The original indictment against Maduro made public in 2020 named him and other current and former Venezuelan officials as defendants.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:54 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonathan Wolfe

The raid in Venezuela Saturday morning in which President Trump said the United States had captured Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, capped off months of threats and accusations.

The Trump administration accused Mr. Maduro of drug smuggling, and the State Department has labeled him the head of a “narco-terrorist” state.

U.S. officials have said Mr. Maduro, a self-described socialist who has led Venezuela since 2013, is an illegitimate leader and have accused him of controlling criminal groups tied to drug trafficking — charges he denies.

The pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro has been building for years, through a series of indictments, sanctions and, recently, military actions.

In 2020, during the first Trump administration, Mr. Maduro was indicted in the United States on corruption, drug trafficking and other charges. Last year, the United States raised the reward for information leading to Mr. Maduro’s capture to $50 million.

In recent months, top aides to Mr. Trump intensified a push to remove Mr. Maduro from power, as the Trump administration tried to recast the domestic war on drugs as an international terrorist threat.

Since late August, the Pentagon has amassed a dozen ships in the Caribbean Sea. With more than 15,000 military personnel in the region, the U.S. buildup is the largest in the region since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

The commando raid on Saturday, the riskiest known U.S. military operation of its kind since members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan in 2011, comes amid a legally dubious military campaign in the waters around Latin America in an effort to raise pressure on Mr. Maduro.

That campaign has been marked by 35 known U.S. strikes that have killed at least 115 people on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Many legal experts say the strikes are illegal and that the military is killing civilians.

While some, possibly most, of the suspected drug runners are believed to be Venezuelan citizens, the targeted boats also carried some people from Colombia, Ecuador and Trinidad.

Unlike traditional counternarcotics operations that have targeted senior cartel leaders, the boat strikes were aimed at low-level operatives in illicit drug trafficking. In seizing Mr. Maduro, the administration will probably contend that it has captured the mastermind behind the alleged drug trafficking.

In reality, Venezuela is not a major source of drugs in the United States. The country does not produce fentanyl ,and the cocaine that passes through Venezuela is grown and produced in Colombia, and then moves on to Europe.

Mr. Trump has also repeatedly threatened to carry out land strikes in Venezuela. Last week, the C.I.A. conducted a drone strike on a port facility in Venezuela which the United States believed was housing narcotics from a Venezuelan gang, according to people briefed on the operation.

The raid to capture Mr. Maduro also constituted Mr. Trump’s latest unilateral exercise of power. He had no explicit authorization from Congress, where a bipartisan group in the Senate has been promoting legislation to try to rein in his authority to engage in hostilities inside Venezuela.

On Saturday, Senator Mike Lee of Utah said on social media that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told him in a phone call that Mr. Maduro was “arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.”

In a social media post after Mr. Trump announced the capture, Mr. Rubio reposted a message he wrote last July, in what appeared to be an attempt to push back against concerns, including from Republican lawmakers, about the legality of the strikes and capture.

“Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government,” Mr. Rubio wrote.

Mr. Lee said Mr. Rubio did not anticipate further action in Venezuela now that Mr. Maduro was in custody.

The Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela has been driven by three separate policy goals: crippling Mr. Maduro, using military force against drug cartels and securing access to the country’s vast oil reserves for U.S. companies.

The goal to oust Mr. Maduro as the leader of Venezuela was an initiative that Mr. Rubio has championed.

On July 25, Mr. Trump signed a secret order for military action against the cartels, calling for maritime strikes. Administration officials referred to the boat attacks as “Phase One,” with SEAL Team 6 taking the lead.

Policymakers at the time also discussed a vague “Phase Two,” with Army Delta Force units possibly carrying out land operations.

In October, Mr. Trump called off efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement with Mr. Maduro, after the Venezuelan leader refused to accede to U.S. demands to give up power voluntarily and as officials continued to insist that they had no part in drug trafficking.

As the strikes against boats continued throughout the fall, Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubio and Stephen Miller, a top White House aide overseeing immigration policy, moved on to the next stage of the campaign against Mr. Maduro: seizing oil tankers to deprive Venezuela of revenue.

They insisted that Mr. Maduro must return oil and other assets “stolen” from the United States before they lift what Mr. Trump has referred to as a blockade.

In its first weeks, the tactic shook Venezuela’s economy by paralyzing its oil industry. Critics called it gunboat diplomacy or, as Mr. Maduro put it, “a warmongering and colonialist pretense.”

Eric Schmitt, Tyler Pager and Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:53 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

The 2020 indictment against Maduro said he had helped to manage and to eventually lead a drug trafficking organization as he gained power in Venezuela. Under his leadership, the indictment charged, the organization sought not only to enrich its members and enhance their power, but also to “flood” the U.S. with cocaine and use it as “a weapon against America.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:51 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Steven Erlanger

Spain, with its close ties to Latin America, offered to mediate and called for “de-escalation and restraint” in a statement from the foreign ministry. It said it was “ready to help in the search for a democratic, negotiated, and peaceful solution for the country.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:48 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

With the original 2020 charges pending in the Southern District against Maduro, the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had referred to Maduro as a “fugitive from American justice,” which appeared to bolster the U.S. government’s efforts to oust Maduro and seize him as it would any criminal on the run from the law.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:47 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jonah Bromwich

Prosecutors in the Southern District had targeted Nicolás Maduro for years. The investigation into him was overseen by a former criminal defense lawyer to President Trump, Emil Bove III. One of the prosecutors on the 2020 case was Amanda Houle, who now leads the office’s criminal division.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:45 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Mexico City bureau chief

Two nights before his capture, Nicolás Maduro made a plea for peace in an interview with a Spanish journalist, Ignacio Ramonet, “The American people should know they have a friendly, peaceful people here, and a friendly government as well,” he said, looking at the camera. “They should know that our message is very clear: ‘Not War. Yes Peace,’” he added, saying his peace slogan in English. He then handed the journalist a red hat in the style of the Make America Great Again cap with the words: “No War. Yes Peace.”

In the same interview, Maduro said he was eager to work with the United States to avoid conflict. “If they want to have a serious conversation about an anti-drug agreement, we’re ready,” he said “If they want Venezuelan oil, Venezuela is ready for U.S. investment — like with Chevron — whenever, wherever, and however they want. People in the U.S. should know that if they want comprehensive economic development agreements, Venezuela is right here.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:37 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

Attention is now turning to the Venezuelan military’s response to the U.S. attacks. U.S. forces did not appear to have encountered significant resistance from Venezuelan air defenses or land forces, despite claiming to have an arsenal capable of confronting, if not repelling, such an incursion.

Jan. 3, 2026, 8:26 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

William Rashbaum

It appears, based on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s social media post, that Nicolás Maduro has been charged in a new indictment. The existing charges filed in March 2020 do not include his wife, Cilia Flores. The earlier indictment, filed under seal, contained four counts, charging Maduro and five others with narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and conspiracy to possess machine guns.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:57 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Attorney General Pam Bondi said on social media on Saturday that both Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores had been indicted in the Southern District of New York. There has been no public indictment of her.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:55 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Edward Wong

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau confirmed in a social media post that Nicolás Maduro has been removed from power and will be put on trial or punished.

Jan. 3, 2026, 7:48 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

National Security reporter

Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, would face “American justice on American soil in American courts.” She referenced his indictment in the Southern District of New York.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:53 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, made televised remarks condemning the U.S. attacks. “Innocent victims have been mortally wounded and others killed by this criminal terrorist attack,” he said and called for people to take to the streets “with calm and vigilance.” Saab also repeated demands that other officials have made for proof that Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were alive.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:34 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jason Horowitz

Pedro Sánchez, the left-wing prime minister of Spain who has spoken out against the Trump administration’s previous military actions in Venezuela, struck a new wary note on Saturday. “We urge everyone to de-escalate the situation and act responsibly. International law and the principles of the U.N. Charter must be respected,” he wrote on social media.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:26 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

In one of his first social media posts since Trump announced Maduro’s capture, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted what he wrote in July of last year. It appears to be an attempt to push back against concerns, including from Republican lawmakers, about the legality of the strikes and capture. “Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government,” Rubio wrote in July 2025.

Jan. 3, 2026, 6:03 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello of Venezuela, considered one of Nicolás Maduro’s top enforcers, called for calm in televised remarks and urged Venezuelans to trust the leadership. “Let no one fall into despair. Let no one make things easier for the invading enemy,” he said. Cabello also said, without providing evidence, that bombs had struck civilian buildings.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:57 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

National Security reporter

Nicolás Maduro was indicted in the United States on corruption, drug trafficking and other charges in 2020, and the State Department had announced a $50 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. In announcing the capture of Maduro, President Trump said it was done in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement. The indictment was sworn out in the Southern District of New York.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:48 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

National Security reporter

Senator Mike Lee of Utah said on social media that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told him in a phone call that Nicolás Maduro was “arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.” Lee said Rubio does not anticipate further action in Venezuela now that Maduro was in custody.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:36 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago, who has expressed strong support for U.S. strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats near Venezuela, said on social media that her country was not involved in the U.S. military operations and maintains peaceful relations with Venezuela.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:32 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

In a phone interview, Trump celebrated the capture of Maduro.

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

President Trump sounded tired.

It was just after 4:30 a.m. Saturday morning and 10 minutes after he announced on social media that the United States had captured Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela. I had called the president to try to better understand what happened and what comes next. He picked up after three rings and answered a few questions.

Mr. Trump first celebrated the mission’s success.

“A lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people,” he told me. “It was a brilliant operation, actually.”

I then asked if he had sought congressional authority before the U.S. military, along with law enforcement personnel, engaged in a “large scale strike,” as he described it on social media.

“We’ll discuss that,” he said. “We’re going to have a news conference.”

In his social media announcement, Mr. Trump said he would speak at 11 a.m. from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence where he has spent the past two weeks.

I tried to ask what he envisions next for Venezuela and why the high-risk mission was worth it.

“You’re going to hear all about it 11 o’clock,” he said before hanging up.

The call had lasted 50 seconds.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:20 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

The U.S. attack has left an unspecified number of Venezuelans dead and injured, Venezuelan officials said in statements. The number of casualties is still being assessed, they said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:17 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Jiawei Wang

Video obtained by the Reuters news agency and verified by The Times shows smoke billowing near La Carlota Airport in Caracas, Venezuela, as explosions ring out.

Video

CreditCredit...Social media via Reuters

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:14 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Emma Bubola

President Javier Milei of Argentina celebrated the capture of Nicolás Maduro. “Liberty advances,” Milei wrote on social media.

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:12 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said on social media that his country’s forces were being deployed to the border with Venezuela, and that there would be additional support “in the event of a massive influx of refugees.”

Jan. 3, 2026, 5:09 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Annie Correal

Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, speaking on a state-run television station, says the whereabouts of Nicolás Maduro and his wife are unknown, and asks President Trump for proof of life.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:54 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

A U.S. official said there were no American casualties in the operation but would not comment on Venezuelan casualties.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:42 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

If President Trump’s claim is true, the Venezuelan constitution states that power would pass to Nicolás Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who runs economic policy. But we are in uncharted territory and it is unclear who would end up in charge. The United States has not recognized Maduro as a legitimate president, and Venezuela’s opposition says the rightful president is the exiled politician Edmundo Gonzalez.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:39 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

In a brief phone interview with The Times, President Trump celebrated the success of the mission to capture Maduro. “A lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people,” Trump said. “It was a brilliant operation, actually.”

When asked if he had sought congressional authority for the operation or what is next for Venezuela, Trump said he would address those matters during his news conference at Mar-a-Lago in the morning.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:25 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

President Trump says the United States carried out “a large scale strike against Venezuela.” He said in his social media post that he will host a news conference in Mar-a-Lago at 11 a.m.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:24 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

President Trump announces on social media that the United States has captured Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, and his wife and that they are being flown out of the country.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:23 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

Venezuela’s defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino Lopez, in a national address, denounces what he called a U.S. attack. “This invasion represents the most blatant outrage suffered by the country,” he says. This is the first public appearance by a senior Venezuelan official since the start of the explosions. General Padrino Lopez is Venezuela’s top ranking officer and is seen as a crucial member of Maduro’s coalition.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:17 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

The U.S. has been building up forces off Venezuela for months.

Before President Trump announced on Saturday that the United States had captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, the U.S. military had launched one of the largest deployments of its forces to the Caribbean region in decades.

The United States Southern Command said that about 15,000 troops were in the region by December. President Trump described them as a “massive armada.” In August, he had secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against Latin American drug cartels that his administration had deemed terrorist organizations.

Since the signing, the United States had carried out 35 lethal strikes on boats that the administration said were carrying narcotics. The attacks have killed more than 100 people. Legal and military experts questioned the legality of the strikes. Congress has not authorized them, nor has it declared war on Venezuela.

Some Trump officials have said that the main goal of the increase in troops was to drive Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, from power. Hours before Mr. Trump announced the capture of Mr. Maduro and his wife, the Venezuelan government accused the U.S. military of carrying out attacks in the capital, Caracas, and other parts of the country.

In recent months, the U.S. military buildup has included transport and cargo planes. Flight-tracking data reviewed by The New York Times showed C-17 heavy-lift cargo planes — largely used for transporting military troops and equipment — conducted at least 16 flights to Puerto Rico from American military bases in one recent week. The C-17s flew to Puerto Rico from bases in New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, Florida, Arizona, Utah, Washington State and Japan.

The United States has also recently moved special-operations aircraft to the Caribbean.

Since October, the U.S. forces have included a Navy expeditionary strike group consisting of amphibious warships carrying thousands of Marines, along with warplanes, attack helicopters and other aircraft.

The buildup also brought the arrival in November of a full aircraft carrier strike group, with the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford and several destroyers loitering roughly 100 nautical miles off the shores of Venezuela.

The Ford and its air wing, however, have not been used to attack vessels suspected of smuggling drugs. Those attacks have been launched by drones and AC-130 gunships controlled by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.

The U.S. Coast Guard has also begun chasing, boarding and even seizing oil tankers that the White House says are violating sanctions on Caracas.

Christiaan Triebert, John Ismay and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:03 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

No senior Venezuelan government official or military officer has made a public appearance since the start of the explosions. The government broadcast an address on all television and radio frequencies, in which a state television journalist read out a statement condemning the attack.

Jan. 3, 2026, 4:00 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Annie Correal

President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, in a social media post, denounced what he called a “criminal attack” by the United States against Venezuela, and demanded “urgent reaction” from the international community.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:54 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Kieran Corcoran

The U.S. embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, issued an alert to Americans in Venezuela, telling them to shelter in place, citing “reports of explosions in and around” the city. It did not give details. The United States suspended operations at its embassy in Caracas in 2019.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:37 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

Eyewitnesses say the explosions in Caracas have eased up but there is still frequent noise from military planes over the city.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:17 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

We are unsure where Maduro is at the moment. But at least some people in his inner circle appeared safe, according to two people who have spoken to them.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:33 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

Last month, we reported that Maduro had tightened his personal security amid escalating threats by the Trump administration. People close to the Venezuelan government said he was frequently changing sleeping locations and cellphones, and one said he had expanded the role of Cuban bodyguards in his personal security detail, to try to protect himself from a potential U.S. strike. Read the article here.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:15 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

President Trump is at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Many of his top national security advisers have spent significant time with him at the club, where the president has hosted foreign leaders in recent days. On Friday evening, Trump received a national security briefing, according to the White House.

Jan. 3, 2026, 3:09 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Qasim Nauman

The Federal Aviation Administration has barred American commercial planes from flying at any altitude over Venezuela, citing safety risks “associated with ongoing military activity.” Its notice, effective for 23 hours starting at 2 a.m. Saturday in Venezuela, did not say which military was involved.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:55 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

President Nicolás Maduro accused the United States of carrying out military attacks against Venezuela, in a statement released by Venezuela’s communications ministry. Venezuela “rejects, repudiates, and denounces” U.S. military aggression in the capital of Caracas and the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira, it said.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:35 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Venezuela

Eyewitnesses report particularly heavy and ongoing sounds of explosions in Fuerte Tiuna, a sprawling military base in the center of Caracas that is home to Venezuela’s top brass and many senior government officials.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:31 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

The White House declined to comment on the reports of explosions in Caracas.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:30 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

A Pentagon spokesman referred all questions about the explosions to the White House.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:15 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, a critic of the Trump administration, wrote on social media: “Right now they are bombing Caracas. Alert to the whole world, they have attacked Venezuela. They are bombing with missiles.” There has been no acknowledgement or evidence so far that these explosions were caused by military action.

JaN. 3, 2026, 2:10 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026

Pentagon reporter

A spokeswoman for the U.S. military in Washington acknowledged the reports of explosions in Caracas but had no comment on any American role.

Jan. 3, 2026, 2:05 a.m. ETJan. 3, 2026