capture

Corporate media have deployed a lexicon of legitimation in their coverage of the deadly US invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife and fellow politician Cilia Flores. Major news outlets have routinely described these events using words like “capture” (New York Times, 1/3/26) or “arrest” (BBC, 1/3/26), which presents them as a matter of enforcing the law against fugitives or criminals, and carries the built-in but false assumption that the US had the right or even duty to conduct its operation in the first place.

The ludicrous premise is that any time an arrest warrant is issued somewhere in the United States, the US has the right to do anything, anywhere in the world, in pursuit of the subject—including bombing another country, invading it, killing its citizens, and spiriting away its president and first lady. Cornell Law School professor Maggie Gardner (Transnational Litigation Blog, 1/5/26) rebuked the idea that the US merely enforced the law in Venezuela, pointing out (emphasis in original):

Under customary international law, a sovereign can only exercise enforcement jurisdiction in the territory of another sovereign if it has that sovereign’s consent. This hard line limiting enforcement powers to a sovereign’s own territory is clear and well-established.

Venezuela, of course, didn’t consent to being bombed, or to having Maduro and Flores taken from the country at gunpoint. Accordingly, what happened in Caracas is best understood not as the US enforcing the law, but as the US breaking international law. It’s misleading, therefore, to use language like “capture” and “arrest,” which evoke the US upholding the law, to describe blowtorch-wielding, heavily armed US forces taking Maduro and Flores prisoner in the middle of the night (BBC, 1/4/26).

‘Abducted, so to speak’

I used the news aggregator Factiva to examine New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage from January 3 through January 5, the day of the US’s attack on Venezuela and the first two days after these developments. The papers published a combined 223 pieces that featured Maduro’s name, and 166 of these (74%) used the term “capture” or a form of it, such as “captured” or “capturing.” Sixty of these pieces, or 27%, included the word “arrest” or variations on the term, like “arrested” or “arresting.”

“Abduction” or “kidnapping”—synonyms that mean to take someone away unlawfully and by force—are far more suitable words for what the US did to Maduro and Flores. Only two pieces in the Post and one in the Journal used any form of “abduct” (such as “abduction”) in any of the articles that refer to Maduro—1% of the combined total articles. In each case, the term appears in quotation marks. The Times ran no pieces in which the word appeared.

The Post (1/3/26) shared a perplexing perspective from Geoffrey Corn—head of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, and a former top legal adviser to the US Army—who said that the US Supreme Court has been clear since the late 19th century that “you can’t claim that you were abducted and therefore the court should not be allowed to assert authority over you.” The article went on:

“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.”

So, despite Corn’s view that the US attack was illegal, he couldn’t bring himself to present Maduro’s abduction as literal rather than figurative.

That article, as well another in the Post (1/3/26) and one in the Wall Street Journal (1/5/26), quoted Democratic Senator Mark R. Warner:

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? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting a similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?

Even as Warner is skeptical about the US’s actions in Venezuela, he still uses the language of “capture” for Maduro, while using “abduct” for a hypothetical scenario in which the official enemy Putin carries out a parallel crime. None of the articles that included Warner’s quote  commented on this linguistic inconsistency.

The word “abduct” was never used in the voice of a reporter from any of these papers to describe what the US had done.

‘It’s not a bad term’

Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself (New York Times, 1/5/26), say that he was “kidnapped” by the US. They’re not the only ones. On Democracy Now! (1/3/26), Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez and US-based Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas both used that word to characterize what the US did to Maduro and Flores.

Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC (1/5/26), regarded the idea that Maduro was “kidnapped” as at least meriting serious discussion. Co-anchor Andrew Chang asked:

Did the US military just kidnap Nicholas Maduro?… “Kidnap” is a loaded word because it implies illegality. Maybe a more neutral way of describing Maduro’s capture is as an “abduction,” but the US government calls it an “arrest.”…

This isn’t some nerdy question about semantics. It’s a question about law, and whether the US has the legal right to extract world leaders from their homes, and maybe even whether other countries might have that right, too.

Notably, when Trump was told that Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez said it was a “kidnapping,” he didn’t push back, saying, “It’s not a bad term.”

However, the only times “kidnap” appeared in the Times, Journal or Post in relation to Maduro and Flores—in 10 pieces, or 4% of the coverage—came when that term was attributed to representatives of the Venezuelan state. Suggesting to readers that a government that has been demonized in US media for decades is the only source that regards Maduro and Flores as having been “kidnapped” is tantamount to suggesting that no credible sources take that position.

The three papers combined to run zero articles treating as an objective fact the view that America “abducted” or “kidnapped” a sitting head of state in defiance of international law, while they regularly used “captured” and “arrested” outside of quotation marks, as if those word choices are merely flat descriptions of reality.

ICE also ‘arrests’

These linguistic choices matter. “Capture” and “arrest” paint Trump, Delta Force and the CIA as righteous heroes protecting their country—as well as Venezuela and the rest of the world—from the villainous Maduros. “Abduct” and “kidnap” morally invert the good guy and bad guy roles, and would portray US actors as the wrongdoers.

This particular form of word play is part of a pattern for corporate media under this Trump administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-ups of migrants in the United States have featured what can most accurately be described as abductions or kidnappings of people—off the streets, at courts, in workplaces and elsewhere—by armed, masked and unaccountable agents, into unmarked vehicles. It’s little surprise, then, that immigration lawyers, members of Congress, and law professors (LA Times, 10/21/25), among others, routinely use the word “abduct” to describe these events.

And describing ICE’s practices as “kidnappings” isn’t some fringe view. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.) uses the word (Independent, 12/5/25), as does Rolling Stone editor Tim Dickinson (7/2/25), and the academic and author Natasha Lennard of the New School for Social Research in New York (Intercept, 7/1/25). ICE’s victims (Mother Jones, 7/18/27; NPR, 7/27/25) and their families (Guardian, 4/15/25, 6/10/25, 6/26/25) frequently describe their ordeal in such terms.

Yet corporate media eschew such language for the same sanitized “arrest” or “capture” language they employed for Maduro and Flores. When I used Factiva to pair “ICE” with the words “abduct” or “kidnap,” just two articles turned up that included the perspective that ICE “abducts” people (New York Times, 7/13/25; Washington Post, 12/3/25), both attributed to critical sources. Five (2%) included a version of the word “kidnap,” all in quotation marks.

Three of these quotes were from the much-maligned Venezuelan government (New York Times, 3/18/25, 11/25/25; Washington Post, 5/4/25), one came from a man whose father and daughter-in-law had been detained by ICE (Washington Post, 3/21/25), and another from a member of the Chicago Board of Education (New York Times, 10/22/25).

The language is freighted in the same way, whether it is migrants under attack from US jackboots, or those same forces unleashed against socialist politicians in Global South countries seeking to escape imperial domination.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Source: FAIR

WASHINGTON — After President Trump ordered strikes that led to the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, celebrations erupted in Venezuelan communities across the U.S.

But for many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants facing possible deportation, their relief and joy were cut by the fear about what comes next from an administration that has zeroed in on Venezuelans as a target.

“Many of us asked ourselves, ‘What’s going to happen with us now?’” said A.G., a 39-year-old in Tennessee who asked to be identified by her initials because she lacks legal status. Even so, Maduro’s ouster gave her a lot of hope for her mother country.

Venezuelans began fleeing in droves in 2014 as economic collapse led to widespread food and medicine shortages, as well as political repression. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans are now living outside the country — including 1.2 million in the U.S.

Venezuelans migrants walk toward Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2019.

(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

A.G. and her now-18-year-old son arrived at the southern border in 2019. Since then, she said, they have built a good life — they own a transport company with delivery trucks, pay taxes and follow the law.

Maduro’s fall left her with mixed feelings.

“He’s obviously a dictator, many people have died because of him and he refused to give up power, but the reason that they entered Venezuela, for me what President Trump did was illegal,” she said. “Innocent people died because of the bombs. I’m asking God that it all be for good reason.”

Dozens of Venezuelans and others were killed in the U.S. invasion — more than 100, a government official said — including civilians.

The Trump administration is framing its Venezuela operation as an opportunity for Venezuelans like A.G. “Now, they can return to the country they love and rebuild its future,” said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser.

Katie Blankenship, a Miami-based attorney with Sanctuary of the South who has represented many Venezuelans facing deportation, sees a less promising future.

“We’re going to see increased targeting of Venezuelans to force them to leave the U.S. into a political and socioeconomic environment that’s likely only more destabilized and subject to more abuse,” she said.

The Venezuelan community in the U.S. swelled, in part, because the Biden administration expanded pathways for them to enter the country.

Volunteer help a Venezuelan immigrant at the storage units from a volunteer-run program that distributes donations to recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants in need, in Miami, Fla., in 2023.

(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Los Angeles Times)

One of those programs allowed more than 117,000 Venezuelans to purchase flights directly to the U.S. and stay for two years if they had a U.S.-based financial sponsor and passed a background check. Other Venezuelans entered legally at land ports of entry after scheduling interviews with border officers.

By the end of the Biden administration, more than 600,000 Venezuelans had protection from deportation under Temporary Protected Status, a program used by both Republican and Democratic administrations for immigrants who cannot return home because of armed conflict, natural disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly referred to Venezuelan immigrants as criminals, singling them out more than any other nationality — in 64% of speeches, an Axios analysis showed. He has said repeatedly, without evidence that Venezuela emptied its prisons and mental institutions to flood the U.S. with immigrants.

One of Trump’s first acts as president was to designate the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Within two months, he invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport 252 Venezuelan men accused of being Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned and tortured despite many having no criminal histories in the U.S. or Latin America.

Later, the Trump administration stripped away protections for Venezuelans with financial sponsors and TPS, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling the latter “contrary to the national interest.”

In a September Federal Register Notice, Noem said that TPS for Venezuelans undercut the administration’s foreign policy objectives because one result of allowing Venezuelans in the U.S. was “relieving pressure on Maduro’s regime to enact domestic reforms and facilitate safe return conditions.” In other words, if Venezuelans returned home, that would pressure the government to enact reforms.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, along with U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, left, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, right, participates in a news conference near Camp 57 at Angola prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary and America’s largest maximum-security prison farm, to announce the opening of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that will house immigrants convicted of crimes in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, on Sept. 3, 2025.

(Matthew Hilton / AFP via Getty Images)

The administration has offered contrasting assessments of conditions in Venezuela. Noem wrote that although certain adverse conditions continue, “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime.”

Throughout the year, though, the State Department continued to reissue an “extreme danger” travel advisory for Venezuela, urging Americans to leave the country immediately.

Conditions for Venezuelans in the U.S. grew more complicated after a man from Afghanistan was accused of shooting two National Guard members in November; in response, the administration froze the immigration cases of people from 39 countries, including Venezuela, that the administration considers “high-risk.” That means anyone who applied for asylum, a visa, a green card or any other benefit remains in limbo indefinitely.

After a panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in September, the Justice Department appealed. In a support brief filed in December, the Justice Department cited escalating tensions with Venezuela.

David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist and expert on Venezuelan politics, said that invading Venezuela could justify renewed use of the Alien Enemies Act.

The law says the president can invoke the Alien Enemies Act not only in times of “declared war,” but also when a foreign government threatens or carries out an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” against the U.S.

“Now it will be difficult, I think, for the court to say, ‘No, you can’t use this,’” Smilde said.

With U.S. officials promising improved conditions in Venezuela and encouraging citizens to return, Smilde said, they could invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who don’t leave willingly.

“There’s several layers to this,” he said, “and none of it looks very good for Venezuelan immigrants.”

This couple from Venezuela shared their story of why they left their three children back in their home country and spoke of the the experiences of their travel to the United States at the Parkside Community Church in Sacramento on June 16, 2023.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Jose, a 28-year-old Venezuelan living east of Los Angeles, fled Venezuela in 2015 after being imprisoned and beaten for criticizing the government. He lived in Colombia and Peru before illegally crossing the U.S. border in 2022, and now has a pending asylum application. Jose asked to be identified by his middle name out of fear of retaliation by the U.S. government.

The news this week that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minnesota heightened his anxiety.

“You come here because supposedly this is a country with freedom of expression, and there is more safety, but with this government, now you’re afraid you’ll get killed,” he said. “And that was a U.S. citizen. Imagine what they could do to me?”

People visit a memorial for Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.

(Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Jose qualifies for a work permit based on his pending asylum, but his application for one is frozen because of the executive order following the National Guard shooting.

The news of Maduro’s arrest was bittersweet, Jose said, because his mother and grandmother didn’t live to witness that day. He said his mother died last year of kidney failure due to lack of medical care, leaving him as the primary breadwinner for his two young sisters who remain in Venezuela with their father, who is disabled.

Still, he said he’s happy with what Trump has done in Venezuela.

“People are saying he’s stealing our petroleum,” he said, “but for 25 years, Cuba, China and Iran have been stealing the petroleum and it didn’t improve our lives.”

Many Venezuelans were encouraged by news that Venezuela would release a “significant number” of political prisoners as a peace gesture.

For Jose, that’s not enough. Venezuela’s government ordered police to search for anyone involved in promoting or supporting the attack by U.S. forces, leading to detentions of journalists and civilians.

“Venezuela remains the same,” he said. “The same disgrace, the same poverty and the same government repression.”

A.G. said she was heartened to hear Noem say Sunday on Fox News that every Venezeulan who had TPS “has the opportunity to apply for refugee status and that evaluation will go forward.” But the administration quickly backtracked and said that was not the case.

Instead, Noem and other administration officials have doubled down on the notion that Venezuelans without permanent lawful status should leave. Noem told Fox News that there are no plans to pause deportation flights despite the political uncertainty in Venezuela.

Tragesser, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, said the agency’s posture hasn’t changed.

“USCIS encourages all Venezuelans unlawfully in the U.S. to use the CBP Home app for help with a safe and orderly return to their country,” he said.

GUATIRE, Venezuela — The United States and Venezuelan governments said Friday that they were exploring the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, and that a delegation from the Trump administration arrived in the South American nation Friday.

The small team of U.S. diplomats and diplomatic security officials traveled to Venezuela to make a preliminary assessment about the potential reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, the State Department said in a statement.

Venezuela’s government on Friday acknowledged that U.S. diplomats had traveled to the country and announced that it will send a delegation to Washington, but it did not say when.

In a statement, Delcy Rodríguez’s government said it “has decided to initiate an exploratory process of a diplomatic nature with the Government of the United States of America, aimed at the re-establishment of diplomatic missions in both countries.”

President Trump has placed pressure on Rodriguez and other former Maduro loyalists now in power to advance his vision for the future of the nation — a major aspect of which would be reinvigorating the role of U.S. oil companies in a country with the worlds’ largest proven reserves of crude oil.

The U.S. and Venezuela cut off ties in 2019, after the first Trump administration said opposition leader Juan Guaidó was the rightful president of Venezuela, spiking tensions. Despite the assertions, Maduro maintained his firm grip on power.

The Trump administration shuttered the embassy in Caracas and moved diplomats to nearby Bogotá, Colombia. U.S. officials have traveled to Caracas a handful of times since then. The latest visit came last February when Trump’s envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell met with Maduro. The visit resulted in six detained Americans being freed by the government.

Garcia Cano and Lee write for the Associated Press. Lee reported from Washington. AP reporter Megan Janetsky contributed to this report from Mexico City.

By all accounts so far, the planning and preparations for the operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro mirrored, to a degree, that of the raid that led to the death of Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden. However, one asset that featured prominently in the Bin Laden mission looks to have been notably absent in the force that descended on Caracas over the weekend: stealthy Black Hawk helicopters. There are clear reasons why this was not the case, but it also prompts questions about the current status of those helicopters and possible successor platforms.

Videos shot from the ground during the mission to capture Maduro, as well as his wife, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, show typical special operations MH-60 Black Hawks and MH-47 Chinooks belonging to the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), better known as the Night Stalkers. Some of the MH-60s were in a unique armed configuration, called the Direct Action Penetrator (DAP), which you can read more about here.

The 160th SOAR’s publicly acknowledged helicopter fleets also include AH-6 and MH-6 Little Birds, which do not appear to have been present during the operation. There has been no confirmation of any other helicopters taking part directly in the operation to snatch Maduro this past weekend.

Stealth Hawk Status

The stealthy Black Hawks used during the Bin Laden raid belong to an adjacent highly classified realm of special operations aviation, with units that have been known by various names over the years, like the Flight Concepts Division (FCD) and now the Aviation Technology Office (ATO). The origins of the ‘Stealth Hawk’ concept itself trace back to the 1970s.

Back in 2020, TWZ published what still looks to be the only known picture of a Black Hawk variant in a stealthy configuration, or at least mocked up to reflect one. We will come back to all of this later on.

The current status of the U.S. military’s Stealth Hawk fleet is unknown. The two examples employed during the Bin Laden raid have been described as effectively experimental, exotic in their outward appearance, and as having been pulled out of storage at Area 51 for that operation.

In his 2015 book on the secretive U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Relentless Strike, author Sean Naylor wrote:

“The stealth Black Hawk gained almost mythical status, like a unicorn. ‘I remember first hearing about it … in 2000 to 2001,’ said a Delta source. The program quickly gained traction. ‘I remember in 2004 hearing that it was a line item in the budget,’ he said. Knowledge of the special access program was on a strictly need-to-know basis, and hardly anyone needed to know. Shortly thereafter the 160th regimental leadership came looking to 1st Battalion—the core unit of Task Force Brown—for two crews to go down to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and start training on the new helicopters. In the end, one crew went after a couple of pilots volunteered. ‘I never saw them again,’ said a 160th source. ‘They’d be permanently assigned out there.’ The program became more formalized. The aircraft were based at Nellis [actually Area 51], but 160th crews trained on them at some of the military’s other vast landholdings in the Southwest: Area 51; China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in California; and Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. U.S. Special Operations Command planned to create a fleet of four and make them the centerpiece of a new covered aviation unit in Nevada. By 2011 Special Operations Command had canceled that plan, but the first two stealth helicopters still existed and certain 1st Battalion crews would rotate down to Nellis to train on them.”

TWZ cannot independently confirm the content in Naylor’s book.

Past reports had said the unique features of the versions employed in 2011 made them challenging to fly, to begin with, and that the decision to use them at all was made reluctantly based on other operational considerations. There are claims that then-President Barack Obama was unaware that they even existed before the mission planning was well underway. One of the helicopters was lost during the mission, and it is thought that only two existed prior to it.

Rob O’Neill reveals the story of secret helicopters that even the President didn’t know about

A much improved iteration of the Stealth Hawk concept, sometimes called Ghost Hawks (not to be confused with the Air Force’s unrelated HH-60Us that are also sometimes referred to by that name) or ‘Jedi Rides,’ is said to have emerged after the Bin Laden raid. How many total variations may have been developed is not known.

The extent to which Stealth Hawks of any type have been employed operationally in the past is another unknown. In Relentless Strike, Naylor wrote that newer versions of these helicopters had been used during a failed attempt to rescue American and other hostages from ISIS in Syria in 2014.

Last year, The New York Times reported that unspecified “stealth rotary aircraft” were part of a quick reaction force embarked on U.S. Navy ships positioned somewhere in the vicinity of North Korea during a botched clandestine mission in that country in 2019. The story does not explicitly refer to them as Black Hawk variants or otherwise describe them. None of the backup forces were employed in the end, according to the Times‘ report, which remains very much unconfirmed overall.

There is also the reality that a helicopter matching this description has never been seen. If they existed in any sort of quantities, there would be a decent chance that they would be spotted, even in grainy videos, at some point, as they would need to train with operators. It’s possible that a small handful of more advanced Stealth Hawk types are operational, but are tightly contained to highly secure locales and training areas in order to remain hidden.

Whether or not stealth Black Hawks still exist in U.S. inventory, the underlying requirement for a rotary-wing aircraft able to get in and out of confined and otherwise complex locations, and do so with as low a possibility of detection as possible, would not have gone away, especially for supporting covert and clandestine special operations. TWZ has also previously delved in great detail into what is publicly known about U.S. military efforts to develop larger, stealthy, short and/or vertical takeoff and landing capable transport aircraft to support these same kinds of operations.

The Helicopters Of Absolute Resolve

The full force package used in Absolute Resolve included a large array of crewed and uncrewed fixed-wing aircraft, with a heavy emphasis on stealthy types, as well as naval assets off the coast. Other helicopters were used to support the mission, but we only know of the 160th SOAR MH-60s and MH-47s taking part in missions inside Venezuelan airspace. Approximately 200 special operators, led by the Army’s Delta Force, made up the ground component of the operation.

“As the night began, the helicopters took off with the extraction force, which included law enforcement officers, and began their flight into Venezuela at 100 feet above the water,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Air Force Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine had said during a press conference on Saturday. “Those forces were protected by aircraft from the United States Marines, the United States Navy, the United States Air Force, and the Air National Guard. The force included F-22s, F-35s, F[/A]-18s, EA-18s, E-2s, B-1 bombers, and other support aircraft, as well as numerous remotely piloted drones.”

The drone component of the force is known to have included at least one, and possibly two, stealthy RQ-170 Sentinels. Some of those secretive uncrewed aircraft are also understood to have surveilled Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the lead-up to the raid in 2011, and to have been overhead while it occurred. This is just one of the parallels between that mission and Operation Absolute Resolve.

“Elite U.S. troops, including the Army’s Delta Force, created an exact replica of Maduro’s safe house and practiced how they would enter the strongly fortified residence. The CIA had a small team on the ground starting in August who were able to provide insight into Maduro’s pattern of life that made grabbing him seamless, according to one source familiar with the matter,” according to a report from Reuters. “Two other sources [said] … the intelligence agency also had an asset close to Maduro who would monitor his movements and was poised to pinpoint his exact location as the operation unfolded.”

“Because of the intelligence gathered by the [CIA] team, the United States knew where Mr. Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept,” The New York Times separately reported. “That information was critical to the ensuing military operation, a pre-dawn raid Saturday by elite Army Delta Force commandos, the riskiest U.S. military operation of its kind since members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan in 2011.”

Though largely absent during the operation to capture Maduro, we know that Venezuela’s air defenses were a major factor in the planning. TWZ had previously explored how the Venezuelan military’s air defense capabilities, while limited, could still present real threats.

“As the force began to approach Caracas, the Joint Air Component began dismantling and disabling the air defense systems in Venezuela, employing weapons to ensure the safe passage of the helicopters into the target area,” Gen. Caine had also said on Saturday. “The goal of our air component is, was, and always will be to protect the helicopters and the ground force and get them to the target and get them home.”

Broadly speaking, the extremely high-profile nature of Operation Absolute Resolve and risk calculus would certainly point to an environment where using a highly specialized asset like a Stealth Hawk, designed to be more survivable in higher-threat conditions, would be warranted. This is further underscored by the use of the RQ-170s, as well as stealthy F-22 and F-35 fighters, and EA-18G and EC-130H electronic warfare aircraft, as TWZ has previously noted.

At the same time, there are glaring reasons why the decision would have been made not to employ Stealth Hawks, or any other similar rotary wing platforms, if they even exist, during Operation Absolute Resolve.

For one, these would be extremely low-density assets with highly specialized capabilities. The U.S. government could easily be reluctant to expose them on any level, unless it is absolutely necessary. As already mentioned, the existence of operational stealthy Black Hawks only emerged after one of them went down, and not as a result of enemy fire, something that is always a potential risk. U.S. forces were not able to secure that crash site after the helicopter was partially demolished using explosives on the ground, and Pakistani authorities had custody of the wreckage for more than two weeks afterward. It was reported that China and possibly Russia got to examine the tail section and its radar-absorbent coating. This would have compromised the operational security around the design, at least to a degree.

CNN: Raid glitch reveals secret helicopter

Even more importantly, various specific aspects of Operation Absolute Resolve would have factored into the decision. It’s not surprising at all that larger MH-47s were included in the main body of a force used to bring 200 troops to the objective in Caracas. This is a remarkably large force to have to convey in an aerial assault into a tight area. MH-47s can carry many more operators than an MH-60. Even if the Stealth Hawks exist, there may not be enough of them to even come close to moving this number of troops, and a mixed force is out of the question. It’s all stealth or not, as one non-stealthy helicopter would give away the presence of the whole force just the same as ten of them.

The attack capabilities found on the 160th SOAR’s DAP-configured Black Hawks, which proved to be particularly valuable during Operation Absolute Resolve, would not be directly portable to a stealthy variation of the helicopter, either. The site Delta Force and others had to be delivered to was a full-on top military installation housing a man that the U.S. wanted in a fortress-like facility. It would be defended by regular troops and Maduro’s inner protective cadre, reportedly made up of specially trained Cuban operatives, dozens of whom were killed in the assault. So once again, unless Stealth Hawks could somehow provide the hard-hitting, fast-reacting support that a DAP could, they would be far more vulnerable on arrival than the helicopters that assaulted the Bin Laden residence. While his compound was not far from a major military academy, U.S. forces were not assaulting the military academy itself, nor was a top target for the U.S. housed at the academy during a military standoff. It also wasn’t a military base located in the capital of the country.

The Bin Laden mission focused on a non-military target that was not a point of interest in relation to Pakistan’s air defense network, the attention of which is centered on threats from India, not Afghanistan. That focus on the other direction helped the Stealth Hawks slip deep into the country from the west. Pakistan’s mountainous terrain also offered cover for the helicopters as they ingressed and egressed the area. This was not the case in the operation this past weekend, where Venezuela’s air defenses were heavily focused on threats emanating from the Caribbean across relatively open terrain. It’s still possible, if not likely, that the 160th made their initial assault in a roundabout way, from the south, sweeping behind the mountains that border Caracas in that direction, but they clearly flew over densely populated areas, at least on their way out.

In other words, the final destination in Caracas was a much tougher and more heavily defended objective in a country on high alert for a possible impending attack, and especially on the facility where Maduro slept.

The unique features found on Stealth Hawks could also add weight, and potentially create aerodynamic inefficiency, all of which could reduce their total payload capacity, too. Even during the Bin Laden raid, the accompanying backup quick reaction force rode in MH-47s.

If the 160th SOAR helicopter force required in-flight refueling, even as a contingency, for the Maduro snatch-and-grab mission, such a capability is likely lacking entirely on the Stealth Hawks, or at least it was on those used during the Bin Laden raid. Many MC-130J Commando II special operations tanker-transports were deployed for the operation, seemingly to refuel 160th SOAR, as well as other helicopters that were part of a contingency force.

Using stealthy types would have required more capability tradeoffs, as well. Night Stalker MH-60s are loaded down with sensors and defensive systems that protrude from their noses and other points along their fuselages. These systems, from electronic warfare capabilities to missile approach warning sensors to terrain following radar, give the helicopters every advantage — but stealth — to accomplish their mission. It is highly unlikely a Stealth Hawk would have anywhere near this same installation of capabilities, relying far more heavily on not being detected for survivability.

Top among these modifications, the 160th SOAR’s MH-60 and MH-47 helicopter fleets have openly received improvements to their already extensive self-protection suites in recent years. This includes new directional infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) systems, which have given the helicopters an important additional layer of defense, particularly against shoulder-fired heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, also known as man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS). There is evidence that Venezuelan forces unsuccessfully employed MANPADS against the raiding force this weekend. The country was known to have thousands of these weapons, and stealth cannot hide from them.

Full video of the Igla missile being fired from Fuerte Tiuna and the response from US helicopters.

After the Igla is fired the launch position is repeatedly hit with both 30mm fire and rockets. #Venezuela pic.twitter.com/haxxyppg2Q

— CNW (@ConflictsW) January 5, 2026

WATCH: Another failed MANPADS/air-defense missile launch at U.S. helicopters over Caracas during Operation Absolute Resolve.

It confirms Venezuelan forces tried limited resistance, but surprise, poor visibility, and weak coordination made it ineffective. pic.twitter.com/45j0ATdSeG

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 6, 2026

Then there is the matter of it having been a moon-lit night on Saturday in and around Caracas, albeit one that was also partially overcast. The weather conditions did still make it easier to spot the incoming helicopters visually, as evidenced by the video footage captured by bystanders on the ground. This, in turn, would have drastically reduced the expected utility of stealthy features. As a general point, it should be stressed that stealth does not equal invisibility. Also, all of the unique avionics that the MH-60 and MH-47 have for navigating at very low levels in any weather may not exist on a Stealth Hawk for the aforementioned reasons, resulting in far less flexibility when it comes to operating in any weather in a high-threat area. This is especially important if the mission is heavily dictated by real-time intelligence, which the mission into Venezuela clearly was.

The need to employ the Stealth Hawks in the Bin Laden raid also notably reflects considerations that did not have to be taken into account during Operation Absolute Resolve. The mission to Abbottabad was launched without the cognizance or acquiescence of Pakistani authorities, but it was also not targeting that government directly. Pakistan’s air defenses and other military assets were very explicitly left untouched despite clear risks of a confrontation.

In contrast, the U.S. had prepared for dismantling Venezuela’s air defenses for months prior to the operation, and did just that in order to allow the helicopters to get in and out safely. If stealth helicopters were to have been used, the second the shooting starts at their destination, their risk of being taken down would go up exponentially without a major SEAD/DEAD effort, which would have also included targeted cyber and electronic warfare attacks. And such an effort executed preemptively would also give away the possibility of their presence. Once again, it was just a different type of target, and the circumstances surrounding the mission were very different both politically and tactically.

Altogether, there are far more reasons why Stealth Hawks or similar platforms were absent from Operation Absolute Resolve than not. And once again, this is all predicated on the idea that these kinds of aircraft even exist in relevant numbers at all, which we cannot say is a fact conclusively.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday defended his actions during the Capitol riot five years ago, joked about being liberal-minded to win the votes of transgender people and mocked a predecessor’s use of a wheelchair while delivering a meandering speech to House Republicans as the party enters a critical election year facing a razor-thin majority in the House.

The remarks were intended to ensure both the GOP’s executive and legislative wings are aligned on their agenda heading into the November midterms that will determine party control of Congress. But Trump spent more time rehashing past grievances during the lengthy appearance than he did talking about the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro or specific steps he’s taking to bring down prices as polls say inflation is the public’s top concern.

He also did not discuss new policy initiatives or legislation on his agenda for the year.

“We won every swing state. We won the popular vote by millions. We won everything,” Trump said, recounting his performance in the 2024 presidential election while seeming to acknowledge that history will side with the Democratic Party in November.

“But they say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm,” he said.

Political trends show that the party that wins the White House usually loses seats in Congress during the midterm elections two years later.

But Trump did try to rally the caucus at times, asserting that his first year back in office was so successful that Republicans should win in November on that basis alone. He briefly touched on Venezuela and talked about money coming into the U.S. through tariffs and direct investment and negotiations to bring down drug prices.

“You have so many good nuggets. You have to use them. If you can sell them, we’re going to win,” Trump said. He claimed that “we’ve had the most successful first year of any president in history and it should be a positive.”

The House GOP is facing a sudden narrowing of their already thin majority with the death of California Rep. Doug LaMalfa, announced Tuesday, and the resignation of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which took effect at midnight.

“You can’t be tough when you have a majority of three, and now, sadly, a little bit less than that,” Trump said after paying tribute to LaMalfa, noting the challenges House Speaker Mike Johnson faces in keeping their ranks unified.

The president also noted that Rep. Jim Baird (R-Wis.) was recovering after a “bad” car accident, further slimming Johnson’s vote margins.

House Republicans convened as they launch their new year agenda, with healthcare issues in particular dogging the GOP heading into the midterm elections. Votes on extending expired health insurance subsidies are expected as soon as this week, and it’s unclear whether the president and the party will try to block its passage.

Trump said he would be meeting soon with 14 companies to discuss health insurance.

In remarks that approached 90 minutes, Trump also mused about unconstitutionally seeking a third term as president. He claimed it was never reported that he urged his supporters to walk “peacefully and patriotically” on Jan. 6, 2021, to the Capitol, where they rioted to try to overturn his election loss. He used his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, to poke at President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat who used a wheelchair.

According to the president, she thinks the dancing he does at his rallies is not presidential.

“She actually said, ‘Could you imagine FDR dancing?’ She actually said that to me,” Trump said. “And I said there’s a long history that perhaps she doesn’t know.”

GOP lawmakers were hosting a daylong policy forum at the Kennedy Center, where the board, stocked by Trump with loyalists, recently voted to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. The move is being challenged in court.

Trump and Johnson are trying to corral Republicans at a time when rank-and-file lawmakers have felt increasingly emboldened to buck Trump and the leadership’s wishes, on issues such as the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The meeting also comes days after the Trump administration’s dramatic capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, which occurred after a months-long U.S. campaign to pressure the now-deposed leader by building up American forces in the waters off South America and bombing boats alleged to have been carrying drugs.

The Maduro capture is reigniting the debate about Trump’s powers over Congress to authorize the campaign against Venezuela, though House Republican lawmakers have largely been supportive of the administration’s efforts there.

Kim and Superville write for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Will Weissert contributed to this report.

Jan. 5 (Asia Today) — The U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro could reinforce North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s belief that nuclear weapons are essential for regime survival and make denuclearization talks harder, a South Korean scholar said.

Im Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, said the U.S. strike and Maduro’s detention would send Pyongyang two messages: an “existential threat” and a perceived justification for clinging to nuclear arms, according to the analysis.

U.S. officials said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken into custody in a covert operation and transported to the United States to face criminal charges.

Im said North Korea has long cited the fates of leaders such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya as warnings tied to its own survival calculus and that the Maduro case would likely deepen distrust of denuclearization negotiations inside North Korea.

He said seeing Washington’s precision strike capabilities could further fuel Pyongyang’s argument that only nuclear weapons can deter U.S. military power, adding that North Korea may accelerate steps such as expanding tactical nuclear deployment, improving second-strike capability and tightening internal control through fear-based politics.

North Korea, which has maintained ties with Venezuela since establishing diplomatic relations in 1974, condemned the U.S. strikes on Sunday as an infringement on sovereignty, according to state media.

Im also said North Korea’s ballistic missile launches Saturday could carry a message aimed at the United States, as the regime continues to emphasize self-reliance in defense amid regional and global tensions.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

At least one, and possibly two, of the U.S. Air Force’s secretive RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones appear to have taken part in last night’s operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Spotting an RQ-170 in the context of a real-world mission is very rare, but it would not be unexpected in this case. The RQ-170 was designed by Lockheed’s Skunk Works exactly for this application, to provide persistent surveillance of high-value targets deep inside contested environments, including in support of special operations missions just like the one overnight in Venezuela.

Readers can get caught up on what is known about the U.S. mission overnight in Venezuela, nicknamed Operation Absolute Resolve, with our ongoing coverage here.

A local spotter in Puerto Rico captured video said to show the RQ-170 returning to the former Naval Station Roosevelt Roads earlier this morning, as seen in the social media post below. The same spotter also filmed clips of other aircraft arriving at the base today, and has been otherwise visually monitoring air traffic there for some time now. This facility, also known as Jose Aponte de la Torre Airport, has been a major hub for expanded U.S. military operations in and around the Caribbean since September 2025. This is just one focal point in a much larger buildup of American air, naval, and ground assets in the region over the last five months.

Leaders around the world have responded with a mix of condemnation and support to the US capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.

Following a large-scale strike on Venezuela on Saturday, Maduro and his wife were captured by US forces and removed from the country. The pair have been indicted on drug charges in New York.

In an initial response, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said his government would “shed no tears” for the end of Maduro’s regime.

Neighbouring Latin American countries condemned the actions, as did Venezuela’s long-term allies, Russia and China. China said it was “deeply shocked and strongly condemns” the use of force against a sovereign country and its president.

Russia accused the US of committing “an act of armed aggression”.

Iran, which is locked in its own dispute with Trump over his promise of intervention in its country, called the strikes a “flagrant violation of the country’s national sovereignty”.

Trump said the US will “run” Venezuela “until we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”.

Many Latin American leaders condemned the US actions.

President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva in Brazil wrote on X that the actions “cross an unacceptable line”, adding “attacking countries in flagrant violation of international law is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability”.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the strikes an “assault on the sovereignty” of Latin America, while Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel described it as a “criminal attack”.

Chile’s President Gabriel Boric expressed “concern and condemnation” on X and called for “a peaceful solution to the serious crisis affecting the country”.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Cane accused the US of a “criminal attack”, while Uruguay said in an official statement it was monitoring developments “with attention and serious concern” and “rejects, as it always has, military intervention”.

Trump has indicated that Cuba could become part of a broader US policy in the region, calling it a failing nation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuba was a disaster run by incompetent leaders who supported Maduro’s administration. He said the government in Havana should be concerned

The Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello urged citizens to remain calm and to trust the country’s leadership and military, saying, “The world needs to speak out about this attack,” according to the Reuters news agency.

But Argentinian President Javier Milei – who Trump has described as his “favourite president” – wrote “Freedom moves forward” and “Long live freedom” on social media.

Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer refused to be drawn into whether or not the military action may have broken international law.

In an interview with the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme on Saturday morning, the prime minister did not condemn the US strikes.

He said he was waiting to establish all the facts but would not “shy away from this”, adding he was a “lifelong advocate of international law”.

The UK was not involved in the strikes and Sir Keir said he had not spoken to Trump about the operation.

Later on Saturday, Sir Keir posted on X that the UK “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president and we shed no tears about the end of his regime”.

“The UK government will discuss the evolving situation with US counterparts in the days ahead as we seek a safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people,” he added.

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas reiterated the bloc’s position that Maduro lacks legitimacy, that there should be a peaceful transition of power, and that the principles of international law must be respected.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the transition of power “must be peaceful, democratic, and respectful of the will of the Venezuelan people” in a post on X.

He added he hoped González – the opposition’s 2024 presidential candidate – could ensure the transition.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the legality of the US operation was “complex” and international law in general must apply.

He warned that “political instability must not be allowed to arise in Venezuela”.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected”, his spokesperson said. He was “deeply alarmed” by the strikes, which set a “dangerous precedent”.

He called on all actors in Venezuela to engage in inclusive dialogue, in full respect of human rights and the rule of law”.

In the US, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said, “Let me be clear, Maduro is an illegitimate dictator, but launching military action without congressional authorization, without a federal plan for what comes next, is reckless”

US special forces seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, in an attack that has taken the country and the world by surprise.

Maduro has long denied accusations by US President Donald Trump of heading a narcotics cartel.

So, what are the implications of Washington’s actions?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Phil Gunson – senior analyst for the Andes Project at the International Crisis Group

Richard Weitz – US security analyst and senior fellow at the NATO Defense College

Temir Porras – foreign policy adviser to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and former chief of staff to Maduro

WASHINGTON — Maria Eugenia Torres Ramirez was having dinner with her family in Los Angeles on Friday night when the flood of messages began. Word had begun to circulate that the U.S. was invading Venezuela and would seize its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Torres Ramirez, 38, fled her native country in 2021, settled in L.A. and has a pending application for asylum. Her family is scattered throughout the world — Colombia, Chile and France. Since her parents died, none of her loved ones remain in Venezuela.

Still, news that the autocrat who separated them had been captured delivered a sense of long-awaited elation and united the siblings and cousins across continents for a rare four-hour phone call as the night unfolded.

“I waited for this moment for so long from within Venezuela, and now that I’m out, it’s like watching a movie,” said Torres Ramirez, a former political activist who opposed Maduro. “It’s like a jolt of relief.”

Many Venezuelans across the U.S. celebrated the military action that resulted in Maduro’s arrest. Economic collapse and political repression led roughly 8 million Venezuelans to emigrate since 2014, making it one of the world’s largest displacement crises.

About 770,000 live in the U.S. as of 2023, concentrated mainly in the regions of Miami, Orlando, Houston and New York. Just over 9,500 live in L.A., according to a 2024 U.S. Census estimate.

In the South Florida city of Doral, home to the largest Venezuelan American community, residents poured into the streets Saturday morning, carrying the Venezuelan flag, singing together and praising the military action as an act of freedom.

In Los Angeles, a different picture emerged as groups opposed to Maduro’s arrest took to the streets, though none identified themselves as being of Venezuelan descent. At a rally of about 40 people south of downtown Los Angeles, John Parker, a representative of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, called the raid a “brutal assault and kidnapping” that amounted to a war crime.

The United States’ intervention in Venezuela had nothing to do with stopping the flow of drugs, he said, and everything to do with undermining a legitimate socialist government. Parker called for Maduro to be set free as a few dozen protesters behind him chanted, “Hands off Venezuela.”

Parker said when he visited Venezuela a few weeks ago as part of a U.S. peacemaking delegation, he saw “the love people had for Maduro.”

A later demonstration in Pershing Square drew hundreds out in the rain to protest the U.S intervention. But when a speaker led chants of “No war in Venezuela,” a woman draped in a Venezuelan flag attempted to approach him and speak into the microphone. A phalanx of demonstrators circled her and shuttled her away.

At Mi Venezuela, a restaurant in Vernon, 16-year-old Paola Moleiro and her family ordered empanadas Saturday morning.

A portion of one of the restaurant’s walls was covered in Venezuelan bank notes scrawled with messages. One read: “3 de enero del 2026. Venezuela quedo libre.”

Venezuela is free.

Around midnight the night before, Paola started getting messages on WhatsApp from her relatives in Venezuela. The power was out, they said, and they forwarded videos of what sounded like bomb blasts.

Paola was terrified. She’d left Venezuela at age 7 with her parents and siblings, first for Panama and later the U.S., in 2023. But the rest of her family remained in Venezuela, and she had no idea what was going on.

Paola and her family stayed up scanning television channels for some idea of what was happening. Around 1:30 a.m., President Trump announced that U.S. forces had captured Maduro.

“The first thing I did, I called my aunt and said, ‘We are going to see each other again,’” she said.

Because of the Venezuelan state’s control over media, her relatives had no idea their leader had been seized by U.S. forces. “Are you telling me the truth?” Paola said her aunt asked.

Paola hasn’t been home in nine years. She misses her grandmother and her grandmother’s cooking, especially her caraotas negras, or black beans. As a child, she said, certain foods were so scarce that she had an apple for the first time only after moving to Panama.

Paola said she was grateful to Trump for ending decades of authoritarian rule that had reduced her home country to a shell of what it once was.

“Venezuela has always prayed for this,” she said. “It’s been 30 years. I feel it was in God’s hands last night.”

For Torres Ramirez, it was difficult to square her appreciation for Trump’s accomplishment in Venezuela with the fear she has felt as an immigrant under his presidency.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” she said. “Throughout the course of this whole year, I have felt persecuted. I had to face ICE — I had to go to my appointment with the fear that I could lose it all because the immigration policies had changed and there was complete uncertainty. For a moment, I felt as if I was in Venezuela. I felt persecuted right here.”

During a news conference Saturday morning, Trump said Maduro was responsible for trafficking illicit drugs into the U.S. and the deaths of thousands of Americans. He repeated a baseless claim that the Maduro government had emptied Venezuela’s prisons and mental institutions and “sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives.”

“They sent everybody bad into the United States, but no longer, and we have now a border where nobody gets through,” he said.

Trump also announced that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela and its vast oil reserves.

“We’ll run it professionally,” he said. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world go in and invest billions and billions of dollars and take that money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are going to be the people of Venezuela.”

Torres Ramirez said that while she’s happy about Maduro’s ouster, she’s unsure how to feel about Trump’s announcement saying the U.S. will take over Venezuela’s oil industry. Perhaps it won’t be favorable in the long term for Venezuela’s economy, she said, but the U.S. intervention is a win for the country’s political future if it means people can return home.

Patricia Andrade, 63, who runs Raíces Venezolanas, a volunteer program in Miami that distributes donations to Venezuelan immigrants, said she believes the Trump administration is making the right move by remaining involved until there is a transition of power.

Andrade, a longtime U.S. citizen, said she hasn’t been to Venezuela in 25 years — even missing the deaths of both parents. She said she was accused of treason for denouncing the imprisonment of political opponents and the degradation of Venezuela’s democracy under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. She said she worries that Venezuela’s remaining political prisoners could be killed as payback for Maduro’s arrest.

“We tried everything — elections, marches, more elections … and it couldn’t be done,” she said. “Maduro was getting worse and worse, there was more repression. If they hadn’t removed him, we were never going to recover Venezuela.”

While she doesn’t want the U.S. to fix the problems of other countries, she thanked Trump for U.S. involvement in Venezuela.

She said she can’t wait to visit her remaining family members there.

The United States has bombed Venezuela and toppled Nicolas Maduro, who was seized and taken to New York.

President Trump’s decision to send U.S. forces into Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and return them to the U.S. to face drug charges elicited condemnation from legal experts and other critics who argued that the operation — conducted without congressional or United Nations approval — clearly violated U.S. and international law.

Such criticism came from Democratic leaders, international allies and adversaries including Mexico, France, China and Russia, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and experts on international law and wartime powers.

“Nicolás Maduro was a thug and an illegitimate leader of Venezuela, terrorizing and oppressing its people for far too long and forcing many to leave the country. But starting a war to remove Maduro doesn’t just continue Donald Trump’s trampling of the Constitution, it further erodes America’s standing on the world stage and risks our adversaries mirroring this brazen illegal escalation,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote on X.

A U.N. spokesman said Guterres was “deeply alarmed” by the U.S. operation and “deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected.”

China’s foreign ministry said “such hegemonic acts of the U.S. seriously violate international law and Venezuela’s sovereignty,” while France’s foreign minister said the U.S. operation “contravenes the principle of the non-use of force that underpins international law.”

Republicans largely backed the president, with both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) defending the operation as “decisive” and legally justified. However, other Republicans questioned Trump’s authority to act unilaterally, and raised similar concerns as Schiff about other world leaders citing Trump’s actions to justify their own aggression into neighboring nations.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) defended Trump’s actions as “great for the future of Venezuelans and the region,” but said he was concerned that “Russia will use this to justify their illegal and barbaric military actions against Ukraine, or China to justify an invasion of Taiwan.”

Trump defended the operation as a legitimate law enforcement action necessary to combat threats to the U.S. from Maduro, whom he accused of sending violent gang members and deadly drugs across the U.S. border on a regular basis.

“The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States,” Trump said at a news conference. “As alleged in the indictment, he personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.”

However, Trump also made no secret of his interest in Venezuela’s oil. He said U.S. officials would be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future and ensuring that the nation’s oil infrastructure is rebuilt — to return wealth to the Venezuelan people, but also to repay U.S. businesses that lost money when Maduro took over the industry.

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi announced that Maduro, who had previously been indicted in the U.S. in 2020, is now the subject of a superseding indictment charging him, his wife and several others with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess such weapons and devices.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi wrote on X.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also framed the operation as a law enforcement effort, and defended the lack of advance notice to Congress.

“At its core, this was an arrest of two indicted fugitives of American justice, and the Department of War supported the Department of Justice in that job,” Rubio said. “It’s just not the kind of mission that you can pre-notify, because it endangers the mission.”

Trump said Congress could not be notified in advance because “Congress will leak, and we don’t want leakers.”

Michael Schmitt, an international law professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom and a professor emeritus of international law at the U.S. Naval War College, said Trump’s actions were a “clear violation” of international law.

He said the U.S. had no authority from the U.N. Security Council to conduct military operations in Venezuela, nor any legitimate justification to act in self-defense against an armed attack — which drug trafficking does not amount to.

Schmitt said the operation in Venezuela went far beyond a normal law enforcement action. But even if it were just a law enforcement action, he said, the U.S. would still lack legal authority under international law to engage in such activity on Venezuelan soil without the express permission of Venezuelan authorities — which it did not have.

“International law is clear. Without consent, you cannot engage in investigations or arrest or seizure of criminal property on another state’s territory,” he said. “That’s a violation of that state’s sovereignty.”

Because the operation was illegitimate from the start, the resulting occupation and interference in Venezuela’s oil industry are also unlawful, Schmitt said — regardless of whether the country’s nationalizing of U.S.-tied oil infrastructure was also unlawful, as some experts believe it was.

“That unlawfulness — of seizing U.S. business interests, nationalizing them, in a way that was not in accordance with the required procedures — is not a basis for using force,” Schmitt said.

Matthew Waxman, chair of the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School, said that in the days ahead, he expects the Trump administration to try to justify its actions not just as a law enforcement operation, but “as part of a larger campaign to defend the United States against what it has characterized as an attack or invasion by Maduro-linked drug cartels.”

“All modern presidents have claimed broad constitutional power to use military force without congressional authorization, but that is always hotly contested. We’ll see if there’s much pushback in Congress in this case, which will probably depend a lot on how things now play out in Venezuela,” Waxman said. “Look at what happened last year in Iran: The president claimed the power to bomb nuclear program infrastructure, and when the operation didn’t escalate, congressional opponents backed off.”

Already on Saturday, some members of Congress were softening their initial skepticism.

Within hours of posting on X that he was looking forward “to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had posted again, saying Rubio told him that the military action was “to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant” for Maduro.

Such action “likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack,” Lee added.

Others remained more skeptical.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said Trump’s remarks about taking over the country and controlling its oil reserves did not seem “the least bit consistent” with Bondi’s characterization of the operation as a law enforcement effort.

US President Donald Trump says ‘a team’ from the US will be running Venezuela for now, but he would not specify who is on the team. He was speaking at a news conference with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

U.S. President Donald Trump has confirmed that Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife were flown first to the U.S. Navy’s Wasp class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima following their capture overnight. TWZ had highlighted the high likelihood that the Iwo Jima had played a central role in last night’s operation in our initial reporting, where readers can otherwise first get up to speed on the details that are known so far.

Trump shared new details about the operation while speaking by phone earlier this morning with Fox News.

“Yes, the Iwo Jima,” Trump said when asked if Maduro and his wife had been taken first to a ship. “They’re on a ship, and they’ll be heading into New York.”

As TWZ previously wrote:

“With what appears to be a very large contingent of 160th SOAR [the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment] helicopters spearheading this operation, it seems likely that the USS Iwo Jima would be used to support them, especially as much of this ship’s air wing has been moved ashore. The special operations mothership M/V Ocean Trader is also a critical part of this effort as it has been in the region for months and sailing with the Iwo Jima, but its ability to support many helicopters is much more limited than an amphibious assault ship.”

“He was in a house that was more like a fortress than a house. It had steel doors, it had what they call a safety space, where it’s solid steel all around,” according to Trump. “He was trying to get into it, but he got bum rushed so fast that he didn’t.”

Trump noted that U.S. forces had “blowtorches” and other equipment they were prepared to use if Maduro had been able to make it into that secure space. It has previously been reported that members of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force were in the lead on the ground.

“I think we had nobody killed … [but] a couple of guys were hit” and a helicopter was hit “pretty hard,” Trump added, but did not elaborate. Details about casualties on either side of the operation remain limited.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. I was able to watch it in real time, and I watched every aspect of it.” Trump also told Fox News. “We were prepared to do a second wave. We were all set — and this was so lethal, this was so powerful, that we didn’t have to.”

Other details about the full U.S. force package involved in the operation in Venezuela are still emerging. This includes a picture now circulating online showing a new addition to U.S. forces in Puerto Rico, U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors. The U.S. military has been building up a large array of air, naval, and ground assets in the region for months now, which TWZ has been tracking closely.