U.S. military forces captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, Saturday in an overnight raid that capped months of threats by President Donald Trump against the Maduro government.
Trump said the couple was being taken to New York to face drug and weapons charges.
The president held an address at noon Eastern after he said early in the day on Truth Social that the United States “carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela.”
Overnight, explosions erupted at multiple locations across Caracas, including at key military facilities, and aircraft were seen flying over the Venezuelan capital.
Some Democratic U.S. lawmakers criticized the president for taking military action without congressional approval. But Republicans hailed the move as a positive step to enforce a 2020 U.S. narcotrafficking indictment against Maduro.
“Our Constitution places the gravest decisions about the use of military force in the hands of Congress for a reason,” U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement Saturday. “Using military force to enact regime change demands the closest scrutiny, precisely because the consequences do not end with the initial strike.”
‘A corrupt authoritarian’
While recognizing that Maduro is “a corrupt authoritarian who has repressed his people” for years, Warner said that “recognizing Maduro’s crimes does not give any president the authority to ignore the Constitution.”
“The hypocrisy underlying this decision is especially glaring,” the Virginia senator added. He pointed out that Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in the U.S. on serious drug trafficking charges, “including conspiring with narcotics traffickers while in office.”
“Yet now, the administration claims that similar allegations justify the use of military force against another sovereign nation. You cannot credibly argue that drug trafficking charges demand invasion in one case, while issuing a pardon in another.”
U.S. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam from Virginia, who is the ranking member of the Military and Foreign Affairs Oversight Subcommittee, echoed Warner’s critique that the action should have had congressional approval.
“The Administration’s actions in Venezuela prove that this has never been about a war on drugs or protecting Americans. This is about regime change and a personal feud with President Maduro,” Subramanyam said in a statement Saturday.
“President Maduro was a violent ruler who oppressed democracy in his country,” the congressman added. “But his capture in this manner will not stop the flow of drugs or promise anything other than more instability in Venezuela, and potentially another forever war started under false pretenses.”
However, Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin praised the president in a post on X: “Extraordinary leadership from our President. Many presidents have talked about holding Maduro accountable, but President Donald Trump is the only one who actually did it. Congratulations to the President and his team.”
Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, also celebrated Trump in a post on X.
“Congress isn’t notified when the FBI is going to arrest a drug trafficker or cybercriminal here in the U.S., nor should Congress be notified when the executive branch is executing arrests on indicted persons. And that’s really what you can make the analogy to here.”
U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, posted a statement on X: “Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is not the legitimate government. Maduro is the head of the Cartel de Los Soles, a narco-terror organization that has taken control of the country. And he is under indictment for pushing drugs into the United States.”
Abuse of power?
In a statement, Maryland’s U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen commented that “President Donald Trump has put our troops in harm’s way, and he has not provided a clear, fact-based rationale for these actions, nor the long-term strategy following these strikes.”
He noted that the act of war “is a grave abuse of power by the President. The Trump Administration is repeating the worst mistakes of our past and endangering American lives — and their motive for doing so is a farce.”
In the District, the MPD issued a statement that said “at this time, there are no known threats to D.C.” It noted that the department is “closely monitoring the events that occurred overnight in Venezuela” and “actively coordinating with local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to safeguard residents, businesses, and visitors in the District of Columbia.”
Outside of D.C.-affiliated lawmakers, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, posted on X that “starting a war to remove Maduro … further erodes America’s standing on the world stage and risks our adversaries mirroring this brazen illegal escalation.”
Schiff said Congress should make a new War Powers Resolution “and reassert its power to authorize force or to refuse to do so. We must speak for the American people who profoundly reject being dragged into new wars.”
