On January 3, 2026, the United States conducted a military raid on Caracas, Venezuela, resulting in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. Now, Maduro is being held in a federal prison in New York City, where he will soon face trial for charges brought by the Department of Justice: narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
This is the first time the US has overthrown a Latin American leader since 1989, when the country invaded Panama and deposed General Manuel Noriega.
At a press conference following Maduro’s capture, President Donald Trump announced the US would “run” Venezuela until “a safe, proper, and judicious transition” can take place. He did not elaborate on how, exactly, the US would run the country, but backed Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez to lead Venezuela as interim president.
Many DHS students may be wondering why the US is involved in Venezuela and what led to this point. This article aims to answer those questions.
Trump’s Motivations
Trump has listed three motivations behind his actions in Venezuela: immigration, narcotics, and oil.
Since 2014, over 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the ongoing humanitarian and economic crisis, as well as political persecution, in their home country. Approximately one million Venezuelan immigrants live in the US.
Trump attributes this number to Maduro. “In Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States,” he said on the campaign trail in 2024.
In the first year of his presidency, Trump sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to the notorious CECOT maximum security prison in El Salvador. Maduro accepted 76 flights of deported Venezuelans from the US in 2025; each flight contained around 200 passengers.
The Trump administration often accuses deported Venezuelans of being members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. The State Department designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization last February. Meanwhile, Trump claims Maduro has been working with the syndicate to send narcotics and immigrants to the US.
Scholars and local American police departments raise doubts that Tren de Aragua has set up organized operations in the US, while an April assessment from the National Intelligence Council found that the syndicate “is not coordinated with or supported by Maduro or senior officials in the Venezuelan government.”
Beyond immigrants, Trump has accused Tren de Aragua and other Venezuelan crime syndicates of smuggling cocaine and fentanyl into the US. However, “counternarcotic experts say that Venezuela is a relatively minor player in global drug trafficking, acting as a transit country through which drugs produced elsewhere are smuggled,” explains Vanessa Buschschlüter, the BBC’s Latin America and Caribbean Editor.
Venezuela is not listed as a source country for smuggled narcotics in the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2024 cocaine report, nor its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment.
Nonetheless, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered 35 known strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea between September and December, under the pretense that the boats were operated by members of Tren de Aragua, carrying shipments of narcotics. The strikes killed at least 115 people. Luis Moreno Ocampo, who formerly served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, deemed the strikes crimes against humanity.
Venezuela’s Oil
Finally, Trump has expressed interest in Venezuela’s oil supply. In his press conference after Maduro’s capture, Trump said, “We’re going to have our very large US oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken [oil] infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Trump has also perpetuated the narrative that Venezuela robbed the US of its oil and assets. “It was the greatest theft in the history of America,” he told reporters on January 4. “Nobody has ever stolen our property like they have. They took our oil away from us.”
Venezuela has the highest oil reserves out of any nation in the world. The Council on Foreign Relations describes Venezuela as a petrostate: a country where “the government is highly dependent on fossil fuel income, power is concentrated, and corruption is widespread.”
Indeed, oil is indispensable to Venezuela’s economic success. It is responsible for over 80 percent of the country’s exports and 17 percent of its GDP.
The Venezuelan government nationalized the country’s oil industry in 1976, thereby creating Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). In the decades prior, Venezuela was flooded with foreign companies, who were allowed to drill as long as they gave a portion of their profits to the state. PDVSA allowed partnerships with outside companies—and, later on, minimal foreign-owned operations.
After the establishment of PDVSA, “the oil wealth led Venezuela to have one of the highest standards of living well into the 1980s,” according to The New York Times. The country already had the highest per capita income in Latin America, as the 1973 OPEC oil embargo caused the price of Venezuelan oil to quadruple.
In 2007, then-president Hugo Chávez decided to nationalize Venezuela’s remaining foreign-owned oil fields. Several companies agreed to Chávez’s terms, which made them minority partners in their former operations. American companies ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not agree, however, and sued Venezuela to compensate for their expropriated assets. Throughout the next decade, the World Bank and the International Chamber of Commerce ordered Venezuela to pay billions of dollars to the two companies.
Thus, Venezuela is in dispute over assets belonging to private American companies, not the US government. Additionally, Venezuela’s oil reserves “belong to the government of Venezuela,” said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
“The oil itself was never ‘our oil’,” she added.
Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and the Economic and Humanitarian Crisis
In 1998, military officer Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. Chávez used the revenue from PDVSA to fund social programs, which helped unemployment and poverty rates drop by almost 50 percent.
However, Chávez instituted several policies that enabled Maduro to turn Venezuela into a dictatorship. He removed term limits for elected officials, packed the Supreme Court, closed independent news outlets, and expanded state-controlled media. As a result, Transparency International named Venezuela the most corrupt Latin American country in 2012.
Before Chávez died in 2013, he anointed then-vice president Maduro to be his successor. Chávez left Maduro with a massive amount of public debt and “economic policies that were broadly viewed as unsustainable and overly reliant on proceeds from oil exports,” according to the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service.
On top of that, the global oil supply far outweighed demand in 2014. The price of a barrel plummeted from $100 to $30. During his tenure, Chávez stopped saving oil revenue in Venezuela’s stabilization fund. Thus, the government had little money they could draw upon to compensate for the decrease in profit. Maduro’s solution was to print more bolívares, but this triggered a period of hyperinflation, which in turn sparked a humanitarian crisis.
Now in Venezuela, there are shortages of food, water, medicine, and gas. If Venezuelans can even find these basic necessities, then comes the question of can they afford it. As of 2024, Venezuela’s poverty rate is above 91 percent. One-third of Venezuelans skip one meal each day, while 12 percent do not eat during the day at all.
“It’s really hard to think of a human tragedy of this scale outside of civil war,” said Kennth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University.
These crises are part of the reason why 7.9 million Venezuelans have left their home country, leading to “the largest mass displacement in the Western Hemisphere’s recent history,” according to ProPublica.
Venezuelans are also fleeing political repression. Like Chávez, Maduro packed the Supreme Court. Additionally, he restricted internet access, alongside prosecuting and jailing political opponents and critics.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner of the 2018 and 2024 presidential elections, but the results were disputed by the opposition, academics, and the international community. In both elections, Maduro facilitated voter suppression and barred opposition candidates from competing.
Some economic analysts and researchers believe US-imposed sanctions against Venezuela have worsened the country’s economic crisis and, by extension, its humanitarian crisis. Trump intensified sanctions during his first term in response to the 2018 election, with the ultimate aim of ousting Maduro. During his presidency, Joe Biden allowed most of Trump’s sanctions to stand.
The argument is that the sanctions failed to remove Maduro at the expense of the Venezuelan people. Eliminating Venezuela’s ability to participate in the US financial system blocked a source of revenue that could reduce poverty.
What Will US Intervention Accomplish?
Venezuelans across the world and in the country itself reacted with both joy and caution to Maduro’s capture. In an interview with The Conversation, Guillermo, a Venezuelan man living in Chicago, said, “It’s confusing. I’m happy that Maduro has lost power, but scared because I fear the consequences of the US taking over my country.”
The Trump administration plans to take control of Venezuela’s oil exports and distribute the revenue itself. This will be done in a manner that will benefit “the American people and the Venezuelan people,” according to the Department of Energy. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have provided few details on how this plan will manifest.
In a piece published by The Journal of Democracy, Juan Miguel Matheus, a Venezuelan professor and politician living in exile, wrote, “The US military operation whisked away the dictator but did not dismantle the dictatorship.” The Trump administration’s decision to back Delcy Rodríguez as interim president proves this, Matheus believes. He does not view Maduro and Rodríguez as the legitimate leaders of Venezuela, due to the rigging of the 2024 election.
“[Venezuela] is no longer simply an entrenched autocracy confronting democratic challenge. It is an entrenched autocracy partly displaced by foreign power, without democratic forces controlling the process,” he continued.
Araceli is a Venezuelan woman who lives in Madrid. “I just feel very sad,” she told The Conversation. “I am happy Maduro’s going to be in jail, but I know the repercussions. I know what a war means. I just want my family to be safe. I just want the simple things. I can’t celebrate until I know my family is safe.”
