Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Arrested

‘The speed…the violence…it was an amazing thing,’ President Trump said of the clandestine military op that saw the Maduro family arrested and flown for US warship headed to New York

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, his wife Cilia Flores, and their 35-year-old son, known as “the Prince,” were charged with running a narco cartel as the couple was taken into custody in a dramatic special forces strike at their home in Caracas early Saturday morning, U.S. officials say.

“I watched it literally like I was watching…the speed, the violence…it was an amazing thing…There’s no other country on earth that can do such a maneuver,” President Trump told Fox News Saturday morning. Trump, who will have a press conference at Mar-a-Lago Saturday, said he watched the clandestine military operation unfold live in Venezuela, one that he said had been “planned and practiced” for months.

In it, Delta Force operators dragged the Venezuelan president and his wife from their bedroom and flew them to the USS Iwo Jima, which is now speeding toward New York. It is unclear whether their son, Nicolas Ernesto Maduro Guearra, was in custody, but he is named in the sprawling federal indictment unsealed Saturday.

Credit: President Trump Truth Social

Maduro and his family will face a judge in Manhattan’s Southern District in connection with a federal four-count indictment charging them with a narco-terrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine and possession of machine guns and destructive devices. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the clan “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

After the dramatic announcement by the U.S. President was met with both celebration and criticism that the raid was unlawful, which will likely lead to a constitutional tug of war. The Spanish sports journalist Cristóbal Soria posted what appears to be the first photo of the Venezuelan leader in the custody of special forces soldiers on X, which exclaimed, “game over Maduro…!!!”

Mandar un abrazo a todo el pueblo Venezolano…game over Maduro…!!!
Viva Venezuela…!!! pic.twitter.com/TCKOV1Lecx

— Cristóbal Soria (@cristobalsoria) January 3, 2026

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The U.S. State Department had announced that the couple were the subject of an arrest warrant reward alleging that Maduro “helped manage and ultimately lead the Cartel of the Suns, a Venezuelan drug-trafficking organization comprised of high-ranking Venezuelan officials,” a network which had been given the special designation of a global terrorist network by the Trump administration in late November.

The new indictment starts by accusing Maduro and other leaders of Venezuela of abusing “their positions of public trust” and corrupting “once-legitimate institutions to import tons of cocaine into the United States.” The indictment also names Maduro’s wife and only son, whose father created a special government position for him as the “Head of the Corps of Special Inspectors of the Presidency,” a job that led him to earn the moniker, “The Prince.”

The family, the indictment alleges, sits atop what federal prosecutors call “a massive-scale drug trafficking” network that concentrated its “power and wealth” within their own family while they “partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world,” including FARC, a revolutionary group in Venezuela, the terrorist outfit ELN in Colombia and the bloodthirsty Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.

Maduro, the indictment alleges, “protects a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of their partner drug traffickers.” The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who, prosecutors say, “operate in a patronage system run by those at the top” of the Cartel de Los Soles.

Credit: White House

Maduro, along with a dozen other Venezuelans, had been indicted in the U.S. in 2020 during Trump’s first term. At the time, Maduro was Venezuela’s vice president for the economy and he was charged with a scheme to “use cocaine as a weapon to flood the U.S.” alongside the country’s Minister of Defense, and Chief Supreme Court Justice, according to the Department of Justice. In 2024, Maduro was reelected in a disputed political contest. “The United States joined many other countries in refusing to recognize Maduro as the legitimately elected president,” the State Department says.

The Maduros’ capture comes after months of U.S. military buildup in the region that saw the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and other warships positioned in the Caribbean, and drone strikes on Venezuelan vessels, the Department of Justice and the so-called Department of War claimed were loaded with drugs. The U.S. also seized two fully-loaded Venezuelan oil tankers at sea, with the President saying his administration plans to become “very strongly involved” in that country’s energy trade.