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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Monday delivered a new warning to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the U.S. Coast Guard steps up efforts to interdict oil tankers in the Caribbean Sea as part of the Republican administration’s escalating pressure campaign on the government in Caracas.

Trump was surrounded by his top national security aides, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a meeting at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. He suggested that he remains ready to further escalate his four-month pressure campaign on the Maduro government, which began with the stated purpose of stemming the flow of illegal drugs from the South American nation but has developed into something more amorphous.

“If he wants to do something, if he plays tough, it’ll be the last time he’ll ever be able to play tough,” Trump said of Maduro.

Trump levied his latest threat as the U.S. Coast Guard on Monday continued for a second day to chase a sanctioned oil tanker that the Trump administration describes as part of a “dark fleet” Venezuela is using to evade U.S. sanctions. The tanker, according to the White House, is flying under a false flag and is under a U.S. judicial seizure order.

“It’s moving along and we’ll end up getting it,” Trump said.

It is the third tanker pursued by the Coast Guard, which on Saturday seized a Panama-flagged vessel called Centuries that U.S. officials said was part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Ministry started evacuating the families of diplomats from Venezuela, according to a European intelligence official speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

The official told the Associated Press the evacuations include women and children and began on Friday, adding that Russian Foreign Ministry officials are assessing the situation in Venezuela in “very grim tones.” The ministry said in an X posting that it was not evacuating the embassy but did not address queries about whether it was evacuating the families of diplomats.

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil on Monday said he spoke by phone with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, who he said expressed Russia’s support for Venezuela against Trump’s declared blockade of sanctioned oil tankers.

“We reviewed the aggressions and flagrant violations of international law that have been committed in the Caribbean: attacks against vessels and extrajudicial executions, and the unlawful acts of piracy carried out by the United States government,” Gil said in a statement.

A new “Golden Fleet”

Trump also announced on Monday a bold plan for the Navy to build a new, large warship that he is calling a “battleship” as part of a larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet.”

“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump claimed during the announcement at Mar-a-Lago.

The ship, according to Trump, will be longer and larger than the World War II-era Iowa-class battleships and will be armed with hypersonic missiles, rail guns, and high-powered lasers — all technologies that are still being developed by the Navy.

Just a month ago, the Navy scrapped its plans to build a new, small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns, deciding instead to go with a modified version of a Coast Guard cutter that was being produced until recently. The sea service has also failed to build its other newly designed ships, like the new Ford-class aircraft carrier and Columbia-class submarines, on time and on budget.

Historically, the term battleship has referred to a very specific type of ship — a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore. This type of ship was at the height of its prominence during World War II, and the largest of the U.S. battleships, the Iowa-class, were roughly 60,000 tons.

After World War II, the battleship’s role in modern fleets diminished rapidly in favor of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles. The U.S. Navy did modernize four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s by adding cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, along with modern radars, but by the 1990s all four were decommissioned.

Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with a view toward keeping older technology instead of modernizing.

During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for a return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.

He has also complained to Phelan about the look of the Navy’s destroyers and decried Navy ships being covered in rust.

Phelan told senators at his confirmation hearing that Trump “has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one (o’clock) in the morning” about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it.”

On a visit to a shipyard that was working on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate in 2020, Trump said he personally changed the design of the ship.

“I looked at it, I said, ‘That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful,’” Trump said at the time.

He said Monday he will have a direct role in designing this new warship as well.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

NEW YORK — Florida’s Catholic bishops appealed to President Donald Trump on Monday to pause immigration enforcement activities during the Christmas holidays. The White House, in response, said it would be business as usual.

The appeal was issued by Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, and signed by seven other members of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“The border has been secured. The initial work of identifying and removing dangerous criminals has been accomplished to a great degree,” Wenski wrote. “At this point, the maximum enforcement approach of treating irregular immigrants en masse means that now many of these arrest operations inevitably sweep up numbers of people who are not criminals but just here to work.”

“A climate of fear and anxiety is infecting not only the irregular migrant but also family members and neighbors who are legally in the country,” Wenski added.

“Since these effects are part of enforcement operations, we request that the government pause apprehension and roundup activities during the Christmas season. Such a pause would show a decent regard for the humanity of these families.”

Responding via email, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not mention the holiday season in her two-sentence reply.

“President Trump was elected based on his promise to the American people to deport criminal illegal aliens. And he’s keeping that promise,” Jackson wrote.

Wenski has established a reputation as an outspoken advocate of humane treatment for migrants. In September, for example, he joined other Catholic leaders on a panel at Georgetown University decrying the Trump administration’s hard-line policies for tearing apart families, inciting fear, and upending church life.

Wenski highlighted the contributions of immigrants to the country’s economy.

“If you ask people in agriculture, you ask in the service industry, you ask people in healthcare, you ask the people in the construction field, and they’ll tell you that some of their best workers are immigrants,” said Wenski. “Enforcement is always going to be part of any immigration policy, but we have to rationalize it and humanize it.”

Wenski joined the “Knights on Bikes” ministry, an initiative led by the Knights of Columbus that draws attention to the spiritual needs of people held at immigration detention centers, including the one in the Florida Everglades dubbed Alligator Alcatraz. He recalled praying a rosary with the bikers in the scorching heat outside its walls. Days later, he got permission to celebrate Mass inside the facility.

“The fact that we invite these detainees to pray, even in this very dehumanizing situation, is a way of emphasizing and invoking their dignity,” he said.

NEW YORK — A judge on Monday scolded Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell for including confidential victim names in court papers seeking to set aside her 2021 sex trafficking conviction and free her from a 20-year prison sentence.

Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said exhibits included with Maxwell’s habeas petition — which she filed on her own, without a lawyer — will be kept under seal and out of public view “until they have been reviewed and appropriately redacted to protect the identities of victims.”

Any future papers Maxwell files must be submitted under seal, the judge wrote.

He said he “reminds Maxwell, in strong terms, that she is prohibited from including in any public filings any information identifying victim(s) who were not publicly identified by name during her trial.”

A message seeking comment was left with Maxwell’s lawyer, David Markus.

Maxwell filed the petition last Wednesday, two days before the Justice Department started releasing investigative records pertaining to her and Epstein in accordance with the recently enacted Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Maxwell contends that information that would have resulted in her exoneration was withheld and that false testimony was presented to the jury. She said the cumulative effect of the constitutional violations resulted in a “complete miscarriage of justice.”

Engelmayer said Maxwell has until Feb. 17, 2026, to notify him whether she plans to include any information from the so-called Epstein files in her petition and must file an amended version by March 31, 2026.

A slow, heavily redacted release of files

Protecting victim identifies has been a key sticking point in the Justice Department’s ongoing release.

The department has said it plans to release records on a rolling basis by the end of the year, blaming the delay on the time-consuming process of obscuring victims’ names and other identifying information. So far, the department hasn’t given any notice when new records arrive.

That approach angered some accusers and members of Congress who fought to pass the transparency act. Records that were released, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs, court records, and other documents, were either already public or heavily blacked out, and many lacked necessary context.

The Senate’s top Democrat on Monday urged colleagues to take legal action over the incremental and heavily redacted release.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a resolution that, if passed, would direct the Senate to file or join lawsuits aimed at forcing the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted last month that required disclosure of records by last Friday.

“Instead of transparency, the Trump administration released a tiny fraction of the files and blacked out massive portions of what little they provided,” Schumer (D., N.Y.) said in a statement. “This is a blatant cover-up.”

In lieu of Republican support, Schumer’s resolution is largely symbolic. The Senate is off until Jan. 5, more than two weeks after the deadline. Even then, it’ll likely face an uphill battle for passage. But it allows Democrats to continue a pressure campaign for disclosure that Republicans had hoped to put behind them.

There were few revelations in the tens of thousands of pages of records that have been released so far. Some of the most eagerly awaited records, such as FBI victim interviews and internal memos shedding light on charging decisions, weren’t there.

Nor were there any mentions of some powerful figures who’ve been in Epstein’s orbit, like Britain’s former Prince Andrew.

Some files removed, then restored

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the Justice Department’s decision to release just a fraction of the files by the deadline as necessary to protect survivors of sexual abuse by the disgraced financier.

Blanche pledged that the Trump administration would meet its obligation required by law. But he stressed that the department was obligated to act with caution as it goes about making public thousands of documents that can include sensitive information. And he said legal precedent had long established that obligations to protect the privacy of victims permit authorities to go beyond deadlines to ensure they are protected.

Blanche, the Justice Department’s second in command, also defended its decision to remove several files related to the case from its public webpage, including a photograph showing Trump, less than a day after they were posted.

The missing files, which were available Friday but no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showed a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump alongside Epstein, Melania Trump, and Maxwell.

Blanche said the documents were removed because of a concern that they might also show victims of Epstein. Blanche said the Trump photo and the other documents would be reposted once redactions, if necessary, were made to protect survivors.

The Trump photograph was returned to the public webpage without alterations Sunday after it was determined that a concern by some government workers that victims may have been depicted in the picture proved unfounded, the Justice Department said.

“We are not redacting information around President Trump, around any other individual involved with Mr. Epstein, and that narrative, which is not based on fact at all, is completely false,” Blanche told NBC’s Meet the Press.

Blanche said Trump, a Republican, has labeled the Epstein matter “a hoax” because “there’s this narrative out there that the Department of Justice is hiding and protecting information about him, which is completely false.”

“The Epstein files existed for years and years and years and you did not hear a peep out of a single Democrat for the past four years and yet … lo and behold, all of a sudden, out of the blue, Senator Schumer suddenly cares about the Epstein files,” Blanche said. “That’s the hoax.”