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Mary Anastasia O’Grady wonders about President Trump’s motivations for sending military assets to the Caribbean (“Trump’s War Drums in Venezuela,” Americas, Oct. 13). Interception of drug smugglers? Unseating Nicolás Maduro from power? Perhaps another, simpler answer: The ships are there to dissuade the Venezuelan regime from invading oil-rich Guyana next door.
Em. Prof. Bill Casey
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The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the spy agency to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgement from a commander in chief.
“Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a reporter asked Trump at the White House.
“I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump said. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America.”
The second reason, the president said, was narcotics trafficking.
“And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela,” Trump said.
The president’s highly unusual remarks about his orders to the CIA came only hours after The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had authorized the CIA to carry out covert, lethal action in Venezuela.
The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Asked if the Central Intelligence Agency had authority to “take out” the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, Trump said: “Oh, I don’t want to answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?”
“I think Venezuela is feeling heat,” he added. “But I think a lot of other countries are feeling heat too.”
In a post on social media on Tuesday, Trump said the U.S. military had carried out a strike on another boat in the Caribbean which he claimed was smuggling narcotics to the United States. It was the fifth such strike since early September.
NBC News has previously reported that U.S. military officials are drawing up options to target drug traffickers inside Venezuela.
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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — At least 14 people died in a mine collapse in El Callao, Venezuela after torrential rains hit the southeast region, authorities said on Monday.
A command post was set up to “coordinate operations to recover the 14 deceased,” led by Brigadier General Gregory González Acevedo, head of the Operational Zones for Damage Assessment and Needs Analysis (ZOEDAN) in Bolívar state.
The deaths occurred in three different shafts of the “Cuatro Esquinas de Caratal” mine, located in town of El Callao, about 850 kilometers (528 miles) southeast of Caracas, the agency reported in a statement on its Instagram account.
Search and rescue operations began with “the pumping out of all the shafts in the area to lower the water level, and then evaluating rescue efforts” for the people trapped inside the gold mine, the statement added, without providing further details.
The death toll is based on other miners’ testimony, fire fighters in El Callao said on social media. Flooding caused the collapse of the vertical mines, known as ravines.
El Callao is a town where life depends on gold mining. Most of its 30,000 inhabitants participate directly or indirectly in mining.
Venezuela is full of copper, diamond and other precious metal mining, where unsafe working conditions are common in the poorly regulated industry.
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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
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World affairs are acquiring some curious symmetries, particularly when it comes to the United States and Venezuela. During the 2024 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump made the South American nation his favorite scapegoat to propel his anti-immigrant policies, by branding its undocumented migrants in the United States as members of a feared transnational gang, the so-called Tren de Aragua. Then, once in office, he deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to internment in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. More recently, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has been attacking alleged narco-boats in the Caribbean which were said to have left Venezuela with the U.S. as their ultimate destination. So far, four boats have been destroyed, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one people. Even as the Pentagon has published footage of the strikes, it has produced no evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. Just a month before these attacks began, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had offered a reward of up to fifty million dollars “for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction” of Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, “for violating U.S. narcotics laws.” According to the Administration, Maduro does not preside over a government but, rather, a narco-terrorist group that has hijacked power and held its citizens ransom.
In a parallel, equally surreal campaign, Trump lobbied for months to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. He did so unabashedly, despite having launched bombing raids against Iranian nuclear sites in June, likening them to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and warning Tehran to choose either “peace” or “tragedy,” with further U.S. strikes to come if it dared to retaliate. In August, Trump announced that he had “solved” seven wars. The claim was largely specious, however, since some of the nations he referred to weren’t actually at war. Meanwhile, his claims to have ended the brief but intense border conflict in May between India and Pakistan appears to have seriously backfired with reports that the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is incensed over Trump’s bragging. In June, egged on by Trump’s envoys, representatives for the governments of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which have long been engaged in a proxy war, came together to sign a document promising to undertake good-will steps toward “peace and security,” but that détente has already unravelled.
As last week ended, however, with mounting hopes that, after two years, Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza might end with a deal brought about via Trump’s ministrations, speculation circulated that the American President might indeed win the Peace Prize, which was to be announced on Saturday. Instead, it went to María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s main opposition leader, who has been in hiding in that country since last year’s disputed Presidential elections. Machado, a wildly popular conservative politician in her fifties, was banned from participating in the elections, so she named an elderly diplomat, Edmundo González, to stand in her place. After the votes had been cast, Machado’s supporters produced electoral tallies appearing to show that González had won with a sweeping majority, but Venezuela’s official electoral tribunal, without producing any proof, declared Maduro the winner. In the protests and street chaos that ensued, some two dozen people were killed, and Machado and González both went into hiding. Eventually, one step ahead of a prosecutor’s arrest warrant, González sought diplomatic asylum in the Spanish Embassy in Caracas and was allowed to leave the country.
On Saturday, Trump made a backhanded acknowledgment of Machado’s win, saying that “the person who actually got the Nobel Prize called today, called me and said, ‘I’m accepting this in honor of you, because you really deserved it.’ ” Trump added that the gesture was a “nice thing to do,” then made some self-serving remarks about how he had assisted Machado—whose name he had perhaps forgotten, as he did not mention it—and how Venezuela “needed help” because it is a “disaster.” A little while later, the White House’s communications director, Stephen Cheung, a former spokesman for the United Fighting Championship, seemingly expressed the President’s true sentiments: “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.” In subsequent statements, several prominent Trump loyalists made it clear that his Nobel quest wasn’t going away, among them Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser, who said, “The legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize will be irreparably damaged if it isn’t awarded to President Trump in 2026.”
Machado, though, is a curious choice for the Nobel Committee, given that she has said she supports Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro and also the U.S. military attacks on the Venezuelan boats. Additionally, one of her top advisers told the Times last month that Venezuela’s opposition was in discussions with the Trump Administration, and had drawn up an action plan for the first hundred hours after Maduro’s eventual ouster. In other words, publicly at least, Machado and her colleagues appear to be on board with Trump’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine and with old-fashioned Yankee gunboat diplomacy in a region where, for many decades, political leaders of all stripes have sought to present themselves as defenders of Latin America’s economic and political sovereignty.
I spoke on a Zoom call with Machado, a little over a year ago, about two months after the elections. A thin woman with long brown hair, seated in a room in a clandestine location, with sunlight coming through a partially curtained window behind her, she was adroit and assertive. She wanted to know everything about the conversation before it went ahead: what topics it would focus on, how long it might last, when it would be published, and, finally, whether I was already recording. But she quickly established an intimate tone, calling me by my first name, and she was very determined that I understand her point of view. Maduro and his comrades were not just cynical and corrupt, she told me, they were “desalmados”—soulless. They were criminals, homophobes, ecocidists, and racists. She was from the center right—“a liberal in the classical sense,” she added—meaning that she is in favor of private property, individual initiative, and a reduction of the role of the state, which over the years in Venezuela had engendered a system of corrupt patronage.
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CARACAS, Venezuela — Some viewed the news as signaling the beginning of the end of the economic, political and social calamity that, for the last decade, has engulfed Venezuela, prompting millions to flee their South American homeland.
“When I saw the news, I cried, hugged my children and prayed,” said Mari Carmen Bermúdez, 34, a supermarket cashier in Caracas. “I feel like our nightmare will end soon.”
Others said the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado — a veteran antigovernment activist who lives here in hiding — was just the latest chapter in the U.S.-led plot to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.
“In my opinion, señora Machado has never called for peace in the country, only for war,” said Yober David Avalos, 28, an appliance repairman and motorcycle taxi driver. “I don’t think she’s a persecuted politician. From her hideout she has called for an invasion of Venezuela.”
The mixed reactions to Machado’s award, both in Venezuela and across the continent, reflect the complicated politics and shifting alliances in the region. The conservative president of Argentina and the leftist leader of Colombia both congratulated Machado. Cuba denounced as “shameful” the decision to honor “a person who instigates military intervention in her Homeland.” Mexico’s leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum, the region’s top woman leader, declined comment.
Some observers wonder whether the award could encourage more aggressive U.S. behavior against Maduro, whom the White House has branded a “narco-terrorist.”
There was no immediate official reaction in Venezuela to Machado’s award. The news generated international headlines, but was ignored by official news channels.
On social media, Machado declared that the opposition was “on the threshold of victory,” and pointedly dispatched verbal bouquets to Trump.
“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!” Machado wrote.
It was a nod to a president who had campaigned openly for the award for himself, and was clearly indignant that he lost out. The White House complained that the Nobel Committee had chosen “politics over peace.”
In an apparent bid at conciliation, Machado reached out by telephone to Trump.
“The person who actually got the Nobel Prize called today, called me, and said, ‘I’m accepting this in honor of you, because you really deserved it,’” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “It’s a very nice thing to do. I didn’t say, ‘Then give it to me,’ though I think she might have. She was very nice.”
While extolled by supporters as Venezuela’s “dama de hierro” — the iron lady, a sobriquet bestowed decades ago on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — Machado is a controversial figure, even within the Venezuelan opposition. Critics assail her unequivocal praise for Trump and his policies — and her refusal to renounce potential military intervention in Venezuela.
Whether the prize will affect Washington’s evolving policy on Venezuela remains unclear. Though the U.S. raised a bounty on Maduro’s head to $50 million, Washington and Caracas are still cooperating on several levels: Venezuela has been accepting deportees from the United States, and the Trump administration allows U.S. oil giant Chevron to operate in the country.
“I think the U.S. is still where it was before,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela analyst with the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. “Ultimately, Washington’s policy towards Venezuela is at a crossroads. The White House needs to decide whether it wants to escalate military strikes, engage directly with Caracas, or simply declare victory and move on.”
Machado has said that her political movement is prepared to take over should Maduro fall, and has a plan for the first 100 days of a transition.
In selecting Machado, the Norwegian Nobel Committee cited “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The specifics behind Nobel deliberations remain secret. But one line of speculation held that Machado was picked in part because she would be acceptable to the White House, perhaps tempering Trump’s annoyance at not winning the prize.
Machado, 58, is conservative and openly advocates for regime change in a government that is in Washington’s crosshairs.
Still, Machado “has a legitimate cause behind her, and the prize means a lot to Venezuelans who have committed to democracy in an authoritarian context,” said Laura Cristina Dib, Venezuela analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy group.
Amid widespread allegations of fraud, Maduro claimed victory at the ballot box in July 2024, but refused to present definitive data backing his claim. According to the opposition, the candidate backed by Machado, Edmundo González Urrutia, was robbed of the presidency. Washington recognizes him as the winner.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado and the opposition’s presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia at a news in Caracas, Venezuela, on July 25, 2024, a month before that year’s presidential election.
(Cristian Hernandez / Associated Press)
On Friday, Machado declined to answer when asked by the Spanish daily El País if she ruled out a U.S. military incursion in Venezuela. Governments, she said, must make a choice: “To be with the people of Venezuela or with a narco-terrorist cartel.”
In a recent appearance on Fox News, Machado didn’t object to the Trump administration policy of blowing up suspected drug-ferrying boats in international waters off the coast of Venezuela — attacks that have left 21 people dead and that human rights activists assailed as extrajudicial killings.
In her Fox guest slot, Machado echoed White House talking points. “Maduro has turned Venezuela into the biggest national security threat to the U.S. and the stability of the region,” she said.
In addition, Machado has failed to condemn Trump’s controversial immigration policies, including the deportation in March of more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to a prison in El Salvador, a move denounced by human rights activists — and by Maduro — as illegal.
Machado has also not weighed in on Trump’s plan to end protected status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans in the United States, a move that could lead to their deportations.
One hope, said Dib, is that “giving her the award is a way to hold her to a higher standard of trying to achieve a democratic transition.”
The award resonated with many in Florida — home to the largest Venezuelan population in the United States — where both Republican and Democratic leaders praised Machado.
Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-Fla.) called her the “world’s bravest freedom fighter,” adding: “Maria Corina inspired us all and dedicated her win to President Trump — the strongest ally the Venezuelan people have ever had.”
But some worried that Trump supporters, enraged at a perceived snub, could hold the award against Venezuelans in the United States.
“We were already being criminalized and singled out,” said Maria Puerta Riera, a Venezuelan-American political science professor in Orlando and Colorado. “This is not going to help our image.”
Special correspondent Mogollón reported from Caracas, Times staff writers McDonnell and Linthicum from Mexico City and Times staff writer Ceballos from Washington. Times staff writer Andrea Castillo in Washington contributed to this report.
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Mery Mogollon, Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum, Ana Ceballos
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Friday announced the creation of a new “counter-narcotics Joint Task Force” which has been ordered to “crush the cartels” believed to be smuggling drugs into the United States that are operating out of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Newsweek contacted the Department of Defense for comment on Saturday via email outside of regular office hours.
The Donald Trump administration has vowed to crackdown on drug smuggling into the U.S. Drug overdoses were responsible for 105,000 deaths across the country in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The creation of a new task force indicates the administration could step up military operations against cartels following a series of airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela that have killed at least 21 people.
On Friday, Secretary Hegseth wrote on X that “at the President’s direction” the Pentagon had launched a new “counter-narcotics Joint Task Force in the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility to crush the cartels, stop the poison and keep America safe.” The U.S. Southern Command covers the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
According to a press release published by the U.S. Southern Command, the new task force combines personnel from the II Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF) “with Joint Force and U.S. interagency partners, represented by the Homeland Security Task Force.”
Lt. Gen. Calvert Worth, commanding general of II MEF, has been appointed as the new Joint Task Force’s commander
The U.S. Southern Command press release said the new Joint Task Force would have a number of responsibilities including “identifying narcotics trafficking patterns to interdict illegal shipments of narcotics before they reach the U.S.,” intelligence fusion between the U.S. military and federal law enforcement and “enhancing partner-nation counter narcotics operations.”
In recent weeks, the U.S. military has redeployed significant resources to the Caribbean sparking speculation strikes could be launched against suspected cartel targets in Venezuela, though the Venezuelan government has accused Washington on intimidation and “military harassment.”
Trump has labeled a number of drug-trafficking groups as terrorist organizations and informed Congress the U.S. is in a state of “noninternational armed conflict” against them. According to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank over 10 percent of deployed U.S. naval assets are now operating under the U.S. Southern Command in the Caribbean, the highest level since the Cold War.
What People Are Saying
Hegseth wrote on X : “At the President’s direction, the Department of War is establishing a new counter-narcotics Joint Task Force in the @SOUTHCOM area of responsibility to crush the cartels, stop the poison, and keep America safe. The message is clear: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold.”
Adm. Alvin Holsey, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said: “Transnational criminal organizations threaten the security, prosperity, and health of our hemisphere.
“By forming a JTF [Joint Task Force] around II MEF headquarters, we enhance our ability to detect, disrupt, and dismantle illicit trafficking networks faster and at greater depth—together with our U.S. and partner-nation counterparts.”
Lt. Gen. Worth commented: “This is principally a maritime effort, and our team will leverage maritime patrols, aerial surveillance, precision interdictions, and intelligence sharing to counter illicit traffic, uphold the rule of law, and ultimately better protect vulnerable communities here at home.”
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen whether the creation of a new counter-narcotics Joint Task Force, and the U.S. military buildup, will lead to an intensification of the Trump administration’s anti-cartel campaign amid speculation airstrikes could be extended to the Venezuelan mainland.
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BOGOTA (Reuters) -Mariluz Palma, the head of Maria Corina Machado’s Vente Venezuela political movement in Colombia, does not sleep much these days. She says she was up before dawn on Friday, browsing social media, when she saw the news that Machado had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I was filled with tears, filled with strength to keep calling on all Venezuelans, to keep fighting for Venezuela’s freedom,” Palma told Reuters, adding that Venezuelans would be gathering on Sunday in Bogota to celebrate Machado’s win.
“Maria Corina deserves this prize and every prize she can get because she’s a woman who risked her life, businesses, family, everything for millions of Venezuelans,” Palma said.
Palma, 48, has spent the last five years as the national director of Vente Venezuela in Colombia, one among nearly 3 million Venezuelans who are living in the neighboring country after fleeing economic and social collapse at home.
Alejandro Mendez, another of the Venezuelan diaspora in Colombia, said the prize “feels like a vindication of the struggle we’ve been carrying out, for liberation, the recovery of democracy and a change of government in Venezuela.”
Popular opposition figure Machado was barred from running in Venezuela’s 2024 election and threw her support behind the now-exiled Edmundo Gonzalez. President Nicolas Maduro, in power since 2013, claimed he won the election but the opposition and independent election monitors say Gonzalez won in a landslide.
Machado has been in hiding in Venezuela since last year.
“(Machado) is sort of the president in exile, despite not being a president and despite not being in exile,” said Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, a lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management who specializes in Venezuela.
He added that the Peace Prize will cement her role as the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, despite her holding no formal title.
As well as strengthening Machado’s position and thrusting her back into the spotlight, Lansberg-Rodriguez says the award’s prestige and global consensus will deepen Maduro’s international isolation and widen fissures within his government.
“The Venezuelan government is more rattled than I’ve ever seen it,” Lansberg-Rodriguez said, citing recent U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the southern Caribbean as well as internal divisions.
He added that the scope of the prize could also reach people within Venezuela who don’t always have access to unfiltered information.
“In a country like Venezuela, where you have very little free media, but you have a lot of social networking, I think (it) will dig much deeper,” he said. “I think that it’s just so unusual for a country like Venezuela that it’s going to permeate.”
The Maduro government has so far made no public comment on the prize.
Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said the award could re-energize citizens demoralized by the 2024 election and ensuing crackdown on protests.
“While this is a much-needed recognition of the situation in Venezuela, the question now will be how the Maduro government and the international community reacts,” Sabatini said.
(Reporting by Alexander Villegas in Bogota; Additional reporting by Reuters TV and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.
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Allies of President Trump are grousing that he didn’t win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. But it’s hard to fault the admirable choice, announced Friday, of Venezuelan freedom fighter María Corina Machado.
The Nobel committee called her “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent time,” and we’d drop the geographic caveat. In the personal risks and sacrifices she has made for democracy, she sets an example for the world.
Educated as an industrial engineer, Ms. Machado has been a leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela for more than 20 years. In 2002 she watched Hugo Chávez destroy institutions and consolidate power. She resisted by co-founding the nonprofit Súmate—“Join” in English—to engage Venezuelans to become politically active.
She was elected to the National Assembly in 2010. In 2013 she was beaten during a legislative session by pro-government members who broke her nose. In March 2014 during a visit to the border with Colombia, she was kidnapped for several hours by armed hoodlums. The following week the regime expelled her from the Assembly.
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(Reuters) -The U.S. Defense Department is establishing a new counter-narcotics joint task force in the Southern Command’s area of responsibility, where the United States has been targeting boats it alleges to be carrying drugs, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said on Friday.
U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is the U.S. military’s combatant command that encompasses 31 countries through South and Central America and the Caribbean.
“The message is clear: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold,” Hegseth said on X.
(Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Chris Reese)
Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.
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The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to Venezuelan political opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Jørgen Watne Frydnes, announcing the award, called Machado “a brave and committed champion of peace.”
He lauded Machado as a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided — an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government.”
Jesus Vargas/Getty
“In the past year, Miss Machado has been forced to live in hiding. Despite serious threats against her life, she has remained in the country, a choice that has inspired millions,” said Frydnes. “When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.”
Venezuela has been ruled by an autocratic regime for decades, currently led by President Nicolas Maduro, whose election in 2024 was widely dismissed as non-democratic and whose leadership is not recognized by the U.S. or many other nations. Maduro has been locked in an increasingly tense standoff with President Trump’s government, which has accuses Maduro of working with drug smuggling gangs that traffic narcotics into the U.S.
The Trump administration has instead recognized an opposition politician backed by Machado as the legitimate winner of the 2024 election.
Rumors have circulated on social media for weeks that Machado, who has remained in hiding since the 2024 election, could be sheltering at the U.S. embassy in her country’s capital. Machado has backed the U.S. military pressure on Maduro’s regime as a “necessary measure” toward the “restoration of popular sovereignty in Venezuela.”
Following the brief detention of Machado early this year, when she was arrested after leading anti-government protests in Caracas, Mr. Trump issued a warning to Maduro about the safety of opposition leaders.
Mr. Trump said Machado was “peacefully expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime. The great Venezuelan American community in the United States overwhelmingly support a free Venezuela and strongly supported me. These freedom fighters should not be harmed and MUST stay SAFE and ALIVE!“
The Nobel Prize was established by a Swedish businessman and prolific inventor named Alfred Nobel, who died 1896. In his will, Nobel said that his fortune was to be used to establish a fund to distribute prizes, “to those who … shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,” according to the Nobel Peace Prize’s website.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which determines the recipient, says the award should be given to the person who has done the most to advance peace in the world. Today that committee consists of five members, selected by the Norwegian Parliament. They consider the nominees in secret, and candidates’ names are kept under seal for 50 years. The nomination deadline is eight months before the announcement.
The award money for 2025 is 11 million Swedish kronor, the equivalent of more than $1 million U.S. dollars.
Four U.S. presidents and former presidents, as well as a former vice president, have won the Nobel Peace Prize, with former President Barack Obama winning in his first year in office for his “efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation.”
The other two sitting presidents who have been awarded the honor are Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1920. Former President Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, and former Vice President Al Gore was given the honor in 2007.
President Trump had said he “deserves” the prize, and he had expressed multiple times his desire to receive the Nobel, citing his involvement in halting foreign conflicts.
Political allies of the president, and some foreign leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had announced their intentions to nominate the president for the prize, although the committee doesn’t divulge nominees.
The president claims he’s ended seven wars — between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Thailand and Cambodia, Serbia and Kosovo, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Armenia and Azerbaijan. Foreign policy experts say some of those conflicts were not full-scale wars, and several remain unresolved.
During a speech to U.S. military leaders on Sept. 30, the president said it would be a “big insult” to the country if he didn’t get the prize.
Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly last month, the president said, “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” citing his role in the Middle East Abraham Accords and his efforts to stop international conflicts.
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María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize Friday morning, beating U.S. President Donald Trump to the prestigious award.
Machado, an opposition leader in Venezuela, has campaigned tirelessly for democracy and is a central figure in the struggle against Nicolás Maduro’s government.
This is a developing story – more to follow.
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Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he “didn’t give a shit.”
Sometimes in fits of anger, loud voices will say they don’t care about niceties such as due process—they just want to kill bad guys. For a brief moment, all of us may share that anger and may even embrace revenge or retribution.
But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.
Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty.
As passions subside, a civilized people should ask: To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?
If anyone gave a you-know-what about justice, perhaps those in charge of deciding whom to kill might let us know their names, present proof of their guilt, and show evidence of their crimes.
The administration has maintained that the people blown to smithereens were members of Tren de Aragua and therefore narcoterrorists.
Certainly, then, if we know they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely have known their names before they were blown to smithereens?
At the very least, the government should explain how the gang came to be labelled as terrorists. U.S. law defines a terrorist as someone who uses “premeditated, politically motivated violence…against non-combatants.” Since the U.S. policy is now to blow people to smithereens if they are suspected of being in a terrorist gang, then maybe someone could take the time to explain the evidence of their terrorism?
Critics of this whole terrorist labelling charade, such as Matthew Petti at Reason, explain that: “In practice, that means that a ‘terrorist’ is whoever the executive branch decides to label one.”
While no law dictates such, once people are labelled as terrorists, they appear to no longer be eligible for any sort of due process.
The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd, at this point, will loudly voice their opinion that people in international waters whom we label as terrorists deserve no due process. Vice President Vance asserts: “There are people who are bringing—literal terrorists—who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”
Which, of course, raises the questions:
The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd also conveniently ignores the fact that death is generally not the penalty for drug smuggling.
The mindless trolls that occupy much of the internet whine that such questions show weakness or commiseration with drug pushers who are killing our kids. A ludicrous assertion to most sentient humans, but one I fear requires a response.
International law and norms have always granted due process to individuals on the high seas not actively involved in combat. U.S. maritime laws explain in detail the level of force and the escalation of force allowed in the interdiction of drugs.
Hundreds of ships are stopped and searched. The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd might stop to ponder that a good percentage of the ships searched actually turn out not to be drug smugglers.
Coast Guard statistics show that about one in four interdictions finds no drugs. So far, the administration has blown up four boats suspected of drug smuggling. Statistically speaking, there’s a good chance that one of these boats may not have had any drugs on board.
If the U.S. policy is to blow all suspected ships to smithereens, should that policy really be extolled as “the highest and best use of our military?”
Jake Romm puts the dilemma of whom to designate as a terrorist into sharp relief: “The hollowness and malleability of the term [terrorism] means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition…that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable.”
Few independent legal scholars argue the strikes are legal. Even John Yoo—a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who infamously authored the Bush administration’s legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques”—has criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the strikes, saying: “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”
Jon Duffy, a retired Navy Captain, eloquently summarizes our current moment: “A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution.”
Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury, and executioner. President Thomas Jefferson understood the framers’ intention that the president defer to Congress on matters of offensive war. That’s why Jefferson, when faced with the belligerence of the Barbary pirates in 1801, recognized that he was “unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense.”
Jefferson wanted the authority to act offensively against the pirates, but he respected the intentional checks placed on the executive within the Constitution. Only after Congress passed an “Act for the Protection of Commerce and Seamen of the United States, against the Tripolitan Cruisers” in February 1802, did he order offensive naval operations. If the Trump administration wants to use military power, it should seek authorization from Congress. And Congress must have the courage as the people’s representatives to reassert its constitutional duty to decide matters of war and peace.
This article is based on a speech Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) gave on the Senate floor Wednesday while introducing a War Powers Act resolution, which he cosponsored.
The American people do not want to be dragged into a forever war without public debate or a vote.
I took to the Senate floor to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war.
Watch my remarks???? pic.twitter.com/eq5fGvmqFu
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) October 8, 2025
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Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.
The high court agreed to freeze a lower court decision that found the Department of Homeland Security illegally terminated the Temporary Protected Status program for Venezuelan migrants, which allowed them to live and work in the U.S. without the threat of immediate deportation.
By halting the September ruling from U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with rolling back the legal protections for Venezuelans. This is the second time the high court has green-lit the Department of Homeland Security’s move to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans of their temporary legal protections.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned order. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the Trump administration’s request for emergency relief, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible. I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.
DHS called the order a “win for the American people and commonsense” in a post on X.
“Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary. Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program,” the agency said.
The National TPS Alliance, one of the plaintiffs in the case, criticized Friday’s order.
“It is heartbreaking that the justices rubber-stamped this administration’s unlawful cancellation of TPS. This decision will upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding, hard-working TPS holders like myself,” plaintiff and National TPS Alliance member Cecilia Gonzalez, who has lived in the U.S. since 2017, said in a statement.
In seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer had argued that the lower court could not review Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to cancel an extension of TPS status for Venezuela and then revoke the country’s designation.
Sauer wrote in a filing that the district court’s ruling “impedes important immigration enforcement policies” by allowing 300,000 Venezuelan migrants to stay in the U.S. despite Noem’s determination that doing so is “contrary to the national interest.”
The Trump administration’s request for emergency relief is the latest in which it has accused lower courts of ignoring Supreme Court orders issued during earlier stages of cases. In this instance, the high court in May allowed the Trump administration to end the TPS program for Venezuelans while legal proceedings moved forward. That decision stemmed from a preliminary order from Chen, who went on to decide the full merits of the case last month.
The judge ruled the Trump administration’s attempt to strip TPS from Venezuelans living in the U.S. was illegal. Chen wrote the Supreme Court’s May decision, which he said lacked “any specific rationale,” did not bar him from adjudicating the case on the merits and issuing a final decision providing relief.
“This case arose from action taken post haste by the current DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, to revoke the legal status of Venezuelan and Haitian TPS holders, sending them back to conditions that are so dangerous that even the State Department advises against travel to their home countries,” Chen wrote in his ruling. “The Secretary’s action in revoking TPS was not only unprecedented in the manner and speed in which it was taken but also violates the law.”
But Sauer, the solicitor general, accused the district judge of disregarding the Supreme Court’s earlier order, which he said was binding.
“Lower courts cannot treat this Court’s orders as good for only one stage of only one case by gesturing at irrelevant distinctions, subjectively grading the persuasiveness of the Court’s perceived reasoning, or faulting the Court’s terseness,” he wrote.
Congress created the program known as TPS in 1990 to provide temporary immigration protections for migrants from countries beset by wars, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions that make it dangerous for deportees to return. Migrants from a country designated for TPS cannot be removed from the U.S. and are authorized to work for the length of the designation, which can last for up to 18 months.
The Biden administration designated Venezuela for TPS in March 2021, and it was later extended. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also re-designated Venezuela for TPS.
But after the second Trump administration came into power, Noem canceled her predecessor’s extension and then rescinded the program for Venezuela, finding that allowing migrants to temporarily stay in the U.S. would be “contrary to the national interest.” The secretary said that the TPS program had allowed a significant number of Venezuelan migrants without a path to legal immigration status to settle in the U.S., straining local resources.
The Trump administration urged Venezuelans shielded through the program to self-deport before the protections would end in April.
But in February, a group of TPS beneficiaries and the National TPS Alliance challenged the Trump administration’s move and sought to have the legal protections reinstated. They succeeded in securing preliminary relief in March and then prevailed on the merits last month.
The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court to pause the district court’s decision while it appealed, but the request was denied.
In its bid for emergency relief from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration said federal immigration law forbids courts from second-guessing Noem’s decision to end the TPS program for Venezuela.
“[T]he Secretary determined that even a six-month extension of TPS would harm the United States’ ‘national security’ and ‘public safety,’ while also straining police stations, city shelters, and aid services in local communities that had reached a breaking point,” Sauer wrote. “Moreover, delay of the Secretary’s decisions threatens to undermine the United States’ foreign policy, which involves complex negotiations with Venezuela.”
But lawyers for the plaintiffs, led by the National TPS Alliance, called the Trump administration’s assertion that the district judge ignored the Supreme Court’s earlier order “baseless and dangerous.”
They also said that the Supreme Court’s earlier order, which allowed the administration to end the temporary deportation protections, caused significant harm to Venezuelans.
“People lost their jobs, were jailed, and ultimately deported to a country that remains extremely unsafe,” lawyers wrote in a Supreme Court filing. “The summary judgment order below has provided respite from that harm by restoring the status quo. Disturbing it now will cause massive injuries to Plaintiffs and their loved ones, including many American children.”
The TPS beneficiaries told the court that Noem has exercised “unprecedented authority to vacate a TPS extension at any time, for any reason,” which they said violates the TPS system created by Congress.
Since President Trump returned to the White House, his administration has sought to end programs allowing certain migrants to live and work in the U.S. The Supreme Court has allowed many of the president’s immigration policies to move forward, including its cancellation of a program benefiting roughly 500,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans.
It has also let federal immigration authorities resume sweeping enforcement stops in the Los Angeles area, conducted as part of the campaign to carry out mass deportations of people in the U.S. unlawfully.
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(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court again cleared the way on Friday for Donald Trump’s administration to revoke a temporary legal protection for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the United States, backing a key priority of the Republican president as he pursues a policy of mass deportations.
The justices granted the administration’s request to put on hold a judge’s ruling that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to end the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, granted to the migrants under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden while litigation proceeds.
The Supreme Court previously sided with the administration in May to lift a temporary order that San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chen issued at an earlier stage of the case that had halted the TPS termination while the litigation played out in court. Chen issued a final ruling on September 5, finding that Noem’s actions to terminate the program violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, said in an unsigned order that although the litigation had advanced to a later stage, “the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.
“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” Jackson added.
The judge also faulted Noem’s “discriminatory statements” concerning the Venezuelans, noting that her generalization of the alleged crimes of a few migrants “to the entire population of Venezuelan TPS holders, who have lower rates of criminality and higher rates of college education and workforce participation than the general population, is a classic form of racism.”
Chen’s ruling meant that more than 300,000 Venezuelan TPS holders would be able to remain in the country for now, even though Noem had determined that to be “contrary to the national interest,” according to the administration.
Trump has made cracking down on immigration – legal and illegal – a central plank of his second term as president, and has moved to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees.
The TPS program is a humanitarian designation under U.S. law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes, giving recipients living in the United States deportation protection and access to work permits.
The U.S. government under Biden designated Venezuelans as eligible for TPS in 2021 and 2023. Just days before Trump returned to office in January, Biden’s administration announced an extension of the program to October 2026.
Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded that extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who had benefited from the 2023 designation.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put Chen’s final ruling on hold, prompting criticism from the administration, which said it amounted to defiance of the Supreme Court given the prior action by the justices in the case.
“This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this court’s orders on the emergency docket,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in its filing.
Some lower courts have expressed confusion and frustration in recent weeks as they attempt to follow Supreme Court emergency orders that often are issued with little or no legal reasoning presented.
“This court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts. Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them – as the lower courts did here – is unacceptable,” the Justice Department said.
In another case, the Supreme Court on May 30 let the administration revoke a different type of temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants. The justices put on hold another judge’s order that had halted the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted under Biden to 532,000 of these migrants while a legal challenge played out.
Immigration parole is a form of temporary permission under U.S. law to be in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” allowing recipients to live and work in the United States.
The administration has repeatedly asked the justices this year to intervene to allow implementation of Trump policies impeded by lower courts. The Supreme Court has sided with the administration in almost every case it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Additional reporting by John Kruzel in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)
Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday he ordered a fourth strike on a small boat in the waters off Venezuela, according to a social media post.
“Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike,” which “was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics — headed to America to poison our people,” Hegseth said in a post on X, which included a video showing a boat being destroyed at sea.
In his post, Hegseth said that “our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route.”
In his post, Hegseth offered no other details on who they were or what organization they belonged to.
The video of the strike posted online showed a small boat moving in open water when it suddenly explodes. As the smoke from the explosion clears, the boat is visible, consumed with flames, floating motionless on the water.
The strike comes less than a day after it was revealed that President Trump declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and that the United States is now in an “armed conflict” with them in a notification to Congress viewed by CBS News.
A White House official said the information was part of a report to Congress required by the National Defense Authorization Act after the U.S. military conducts an attack.
Last month, the U.S. military carried out three other deadly strikes against boats in the Caribbean that the administration accused of ferrying drugs.
With the latest strike, at least three of these operations have been carried out on vessels that originated from Venezuela.
The strikes followed a buildup of U.S. maritime forces in the Caribbean unlike any seen in recent times.
The Navy’s presence in the region — eight warships with over 5,000 sailors and Marines — has been pretty stable for weeks, according to two defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s government slammed what it called an “illegal incursion” by U.S. fighter jets into an area under Venezuelan air traffic control, accusing the United States of a “provocation” that “threatens national sovereignty.”
The Venezuelan foreign and defense ministries said the planes were detected “75 kilometers from our shores,” without saying whether they violated Venezuelan airspace.
Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino earlier claimed five U.S. fighter jets had “dared to approach the Venezuelan coast” and had been detected by air defenses and the tracking systems of Maiquetia international airport, which serves the capital Caracas.
In their joint statement, the defense and economy ministries accused the United States of flouting international law and jeopardizing civil aviation in the Caribbean Sea.
The Pentagon hasn’t responded to a CBS News request for comment on the claims.
Mr. Trump last month dispatched 10 F-35 aircraft to Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory in the Caribbean, as part of the biggest military deployment in the area in over three decades.
contributed to this report.
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