President Donald Trump declared Saturday that the United States will take control of Venezuela and tap its huge oil reserves following the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a major military operation, a dramatic move that has thrown the nation into turmoil after weeks of escalating tensions.
“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolás Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.
Trump’s statement followed a rapid operation in which Special Forces seized Maduro and his wife as airstrikes struck several locations.
He later stated that the United States would assume a leading role in governing Venezuela for an indefinite period until a transition could be arranged, while openly threatening a “second and much larger attack.”
“We’re going to be running it,” he said at a press conference Saturday morning from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
"We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure," he said.
"We'll be selling large amounts of oil," he added.
When reporters questioned Trump about previous unsuccessful U.S. efforts at regime change, he dismissed them as actions taken under other administrations. He also framed the Venezuelan intervention as an “America First” move, emphasizing the need to protect U.S. energy interests.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council in response to the U.S. attack, Foreign Minister Yván Gil Pinto announced.
He said in a letter sent to the U.N. that “no cowardly attack will prevail against the strength of this people, who will emerge victorious.”
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez demanded the “immediate release” of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Rodríguez said Venezuela’s territorial integrity was “savagely attacked” by the U.S. operation.
U.S. Captures Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro
The attack came after escalating friction between Washington and Caracas. The U.S. military has recently gathered along the coast, targeting what it describes as drug-trafficking vessels off Venezuela’s shores. The bombing campaign turned out to be only one component of a larger strategy to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power and extradite him to the United States to face narco-trafficking charges.
Maduro, a socialist who has led Venezuela since 2013 following his ideological predecessor Hugo Chávez, had condemned earlier military actions as little more than a disguised attempt to overthrow his government.
During both administrations, tensions with the U.S. escalated over issues including foreign policy, oil, and human rights.
Trump Labels Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro a U.S. Drug-Trafficking Threat
On August 7, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a $50 million reward for information that could lead to the arrest of Maduro, who has been formally charged with drug trafficking by the Justice Department since 2020.
Bondi declared that Maduro “is one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world and a threat to the national security” of the United States. However, no definitive proof has been provided linking the Venezuelan leader to international drug trafficking, and Caracas has categorically denied the allegations.
“For there to be a drug cartel, either you produce (the drugs), you process it, or you traffic it. And if there is no cultivation, production, or drug trafficking in Venezuela, how can there be a cartel? It’s unsustainable,” Venezuelan congresswoman Blanca Eekhout told CNN, referring to Cartel de los Soles, an alleged drug trafficking organization that the United States claims is led by Maduro and that the Trump administration declared a terrorist organization.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Venezuela is not a cocaine-producing country.
According to U.N. researchers, almost all coca crops – the main ingredient of cocaine – are concentrated in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.
In other words, of the 3,700 tons of coca produced worldwide, more than 2,500 tons come from Colombia, while Venezuela does not appear on production maps, according to the latest UNODC report published in June.
In addition, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released an annual cocaine report in 2024, which identified Colombia as the primary source of cocaine seized by the U.S. About 84 percent of the cocaine seized in the U.S. comes from Colombia. The report does not mention Venezuela.
Colombia and Peru are primarily mentioned among producers, while Ecuador, Central America, and Mexico are mentioned among transit countries.
U.S. Designates Cartel de Los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization
In 2025, after Trump took office for a second term, the U.S. government designated the Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization.
Cartel de los Soles, which means cartel of the suns in English, is used to describe a decentralized network of Venezuelan groups within the armed forces linked to drug trafficking.
The administration has asserted that Maduro heads the group, characterizing it as a terrorist organization, a move in which the president appeared to claim the power to treat suspected smugglers not as criminals but as enemy combatants.
“Cartel de los Soles by and with other designated FTOs including Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel are responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe,” the State Department said in a press release last November.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations would allow the U.S. to use every tool possible, including the Pentagon, to target these groups.
In addition, Trump suggested that designating Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization allows the U.S. military the ability to target Maduro’s assets and infrastructure inside Venezuela, according to a CNN report.
However, governments that U.S. administrations seek to sanction for financing, otherwise fomenting, or tolerating extremist violence are usually designated “state sponsors of terrorism.” Venezuela is not on that list.
“They’re designating a non-thing that is not a terror organization as a terrorist organization,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in war powers issues, told CNN last November.
“The concerning aspect of this move is that it could be a prelude to military action against the Venezuelan government itself,” Finucane said, calling it another step in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “efforts to cloak a regime change operation in the guise of counternarcotics.”
The administration, he said, is “inventing a fact pattern” and “creating an alternate reality” in order to be able to publicly characterize its policy toward Venezuela as a counterterrorism campaign.
Another former senior U.S. government official said the Trump administration’s assertions are based on “bad intel,” likely from the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration, that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny before the greater intelligence community, or that “it is purely political.”
Trump Claims Venezuela’s Maduro Sent Members of Tren de Aragua to the U.S.
At a Saturday morning news conference detailing the United States' operation in Venezuela, President Donald Trump referenced Colorado, reiterating allegations that Maduro trafficked massive amounts of illegal drugs and accusing him of sending gangs to the United States, including Colorado.
"Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Arragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide, and he did indeed," he said. "They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they call the police. They were brutal. But they're not so brutal now."
Trump’s remarks on Saturday echoed his comments during the September 2024 presidential debate, where he falsely asserted that the city of Aurora had been overrun by members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
However, there is no evidence that Maduro sent members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S.
An April report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council contradicted Trump’s statements about links between Maduro and Tren de Aragua. “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables [Tren de Aragua, or TDA] to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the report said.
Trump Claims Each U.S. Boat Strike Off Venezuela’s Coast Saves 25,000 Lives
In October, Trump said at a media conference that the military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela have saved “at least 100,000 lives,” adding that the drugs on each boat would kill “on average, 25,000 people.”
However, the total number of U.S. drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025 was about 73,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Moreover, the White House and Defense Department have provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs that the boats were carrying, nor that the people on the boats were planning to try to get such drugs into the U.S.
Experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact that the Caribbean is not recognized as a major route for drug trafficking, nor is Venezuela seen as a primary source of the drugs entering the U.S.
Trump Claims Venezuela ‘Stole’ U.S. Oil in the Past
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform in December. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.”
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government released a statement accusing Trump of “violating international law, free trade, and the principle of free navigation” with “a reckless and grave threat” against the South American country.
“On his social media, he assumes that Venezuela’s oil, land, and mineral wealth are his property,” the statement said of Trump’s post. “Consequently, he demands that Venezuela immediately hand over all its riches. The President of the United States intends to impose, in an utterly irrational manner, a supposed naval blockade on Venezuela with the aim of stealing the wealth that belongs to our nation.”
In the early 1900s, Venezuela’s longtime ruler Juan Vicente Gómez granted foreign corporations near-total control over the nation’s oil reserves. By 1975, the country moved to nationalize its oil industry.
Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, said, "Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen oil and land from the U.S. is baseless."
In a Washington Post article, Rodríguez noted that "the U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil — relatively cheap oil — than to have a production collapse in Venezuela," Rodríguez said. As a result, the change was "relatively uncontroversial" at the time.
Maduro’s Capture Triggers Numerous Questions
During a televised address after Trump’s news conference, Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, demanded the U.S. free Maduro, called him the country’s rightful leader, and said what was happening to Venezuela “is an atrocity that violates international law.”
"Governments around the world are shocked that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has become the victim and target of an attack of this nature, which undoubtedly has Zionist undertones," Rodríguez said.
In November, Maduro said during a speech to Bolivarian Integral Base Committees that "there are those who want to hand this country over to the devils — you know who, right? The far-right Zionists want to hand this country over to the devils."
In addition, after the U.S. seized Maduro, Israel welcomed the move, despite it being widely condemned by officials and political leaders worldwide as illegal. Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said on X, "Israel commends the United States' operation, led by President Trump, which acted as the leader of the free world."
Tucker Carlson, the American journalist and political commentator, also questioned whether the U.S. is pursuing regime change in Venezuela in the name of gay marriage. He said that “in Venezuela gay marriage is banned, abortion is banned; sex changes for transgenderism are banned. It is one of the very few countries in the entire hemisphere with those policies.”
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