The United States seizes Venezuela's president

In the early hours of 3 January 2026, United States special operations forces carried out a raid on Caracas and took Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, along with his wife Cilia Flores, out of the country. Hours later they appeared in federal court in New York, facing charges of drug trafficking and related offences. Maduro said he was innocent.

The operation was unusually open about its own details. President Trump said he gave the order at 10:46 p.m. on 2 January. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs described an effort involving more than 150 aircraft, with the couple brought aboard a US warship at 3:29 a.m. on the 3rd. Trump announced the capture at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago the same morning, saying the United States would ‘manage’ Venezuela until a ‘secure’ transition could be arranged.

Maduro and his wife made their first appearance before a judge in the Southern District of New York on 5 January, where they rejected the charges. They are being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The arrest of a sitting head of state by a foreign power is without obvious modern precedent, and the legal basis is thin. The United States has long pursued Maduro under a theory that he is a criminal suspect in drug and money-laundering cases, an argument the Venezuelan government rejects as a cover for regime change. The administration points to the drug-trafficking indictments and to what it calls the illegitimacy of the Maduro government; critics, including many governments in the region, say the operation violated the most basic rules of sovereignty and of international law.

Reaction has followed predictable lines. Several Latin American governments called the raid a serious violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and warned of a dangerous precedent. European governments were more cautious, asking for international law to be respected while noting Maduro’s disputed claim to power. Inside Venezuela, the arrest leaves a power vacuum that the armed forces and Maduro’s party are trying to fill, and it is far from clear who speaks for the state.

For Washington, the gamble is that removing a ruler most of the region already refused to recognize will open a path to a new government. The risk is that it turns a long-running stand-off into a crisis with no obvious exit, and that the international outcry costs more than the operation gains. A military seizure of a foreign president is the kind of step that every other country is now free to copy, and few will be reassured by the reasoning offered for it. I count myself among the unconvinced: a president may deserve to lose power, but the way he loses it sets a rule for every other country to follow, and breaking that rule to remove one bad ruler tends to leave behind a precedent rather than a solution.