Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife could appear in federal court in Manhattan within days to face narco-terrorism charges, which, if accepted by a jury, could put them behind bars on American soil for decades.
A plane carrying Maduro arrived at a suburban airport outside New York on Saturday evening. He was expected to be processed by Drug Enforcement Administration officials and will be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn until a court appearance, most likely on Monday, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Maduro’s capture and indictment have drawn protests from some lawmakers and scholars, who say international law does not allow President Donald Trump to unilaterally attack a foreign country and bring its leader to the U.S. to face charges.
Even those critics, however, concede that under Supreme Court precedent, those arguments are unlikely to have much impact on federal legal proceedings once Maduro gets to U.S. court.
Trump and his top aides defended the decision to capture Maduro. They noted that the U.S. and many other countries have long viewed Maduro as an illegitimate leader who has remained in power despite losing the country’s most recent election. Officials sought to portray the extraordinary military action against Venezuela as a straightforward law enforcement operation, with the military backing up the Justice Department as they sought to bring someone to U.S. court.
“At its core, this was an arrest of two indicted fugitives of American justice,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a news conference with Trump on Saturday.
A sweeping four-count indictment against Maduro was unsealed in the Southern District of New York on Saturday. It alleged that he, his wife, Cilia Flores, and members of their inner circle illegally enriched themselves as they conspired to flood the United States with cocaine. Among the charges: narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.
“The defendants, and other corrupt members of the regime facilitated the empowerment and growth of violent narco-terrorist groups fueling their organizations with cocaine profits,” the indictment reads. “These narco-terrorist organizations not only worked directly with and sent profits to high-ranking Venezuelan officials, but also reaped the benefits of the increased value of that cocaine at each transshipment point along the way to the United States, where demand and thus the price of cocaine is highest.”
The remarkable prosecution of a foreign leader in American federal court was the result of Trump’s deployment of the U.S. military to strike Venezuela overnight and capture Maduro and his wife, bringing them to New York to face charges.
Trump at the Saturday news conference gave reporters a more expansive set of reasons for Maduro’s capture, saying that the U.S. attack was justified, in part, because Venezuela stole U.S. oil — claims that are not included in the indictment. He also said the United States will “run” the South American country until a succession plan is determined.
Critics said Trump’s arguments raised more legal questions.
“If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?” Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement. “What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president? Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”
International law experts, however, said that while those issues may be debated in Congress and international bodies, they are unlikely to affect the legal proceedings against Maduro and his co-defendants in U.S. court.
A line of Supreme Court cases starting in the late 19th century makes clear that “you can’t claim that you were abducted and therefore the court should not be allowed to assert authority over you,” said Geoffrey Corn, who heads the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University and is a former top legal adviser to the U.S. Army.
“Maduro is not going to be able to avoid being brought to trial because he was abducted so to speak, even if he can establish it violated International law.” Corn said, adding that in his view the administration’s overnight military operation lacked any “plausible legal basis.”
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who previously headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush administration, noted on Substack that similar arguments were raised after U.S. forces deposed Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega on Jan. 3, 1990. Courts upheld the government’s right to try Noriega, who was convicted on drug charges in 1992 and sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.
The charging document against Maduro unsealed Saturday — known as a superseding indictment — is an update to charges filed against him and his associates during the first Trump administration in 2020. At the time, U.S. leaders conceded that they couldn’t go into Venezuela and arrest Maduro. The charges essentially made him an international fugitive, who risked arrest if he traveled outside his country.
The superseding indictment contains the same four charges as the original 2020 indictment. But the new indictment also names Flores, who was not a co-defendant in the 2020 case. Some of the other co-defendants — all part of Maduro’s inner circle — are also different, including Maduro’s son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro.
The younger Maduro does not appear to have been captured.
U.S. authorities have alleged that Maduro and his inner circle worked with international drug trafficking groups to transform Venezuela into a transshipment hub for moving massive amounts of cocaine to the United States. Maduro and his associates created a culture of corruption in which the Venezuelan elite made themselves rich through drug trafficking, the indictment alleged. Drug traffickers, the document said, gave these leaders a portion of their profits in exchange for protection and aid.
“In turn, these politicians used the cocaine fueled payments to maintain and augment their political power,” the indictment states.
Jeremy Paul, a law professor at Northeastern University, said the Trump administration had no legal authority to stage the military intervention, but he agreed that it probably would not derail Maduro’s prosecution.
The administration’s justification is “a terrifying theory, because, as I have been saying to people, you’re basically saying that U.S. prosecutors and a grand jury is all you need as justification for sending the military into another country,” Paul said. “That can’t be the law.”
Trump also faced criticism Saturday from Democratic lawmakers for striking Venezuela and capturing Maduro just a month after he pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a U.S. court last year on drug trafficking charges.
Maduro’s case in the Southern District of New York was randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, a 92-year-old jurist appointed by President Bill Clinton and who last year was among a group of judges who prohibited the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants. Those findings are under appeal.
Hellerstein did not take any action in the case against Maduro on Saturday, and an appearance in court has not yet been publicly announced. But public officials, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have said that officials are arranging this weekend to transport Maduro and his wife to New York.
