President Donald Trump said the United States “will run” Venezuela until a U.S.-approved transfer of power can take place, following a U.S. attack on the country and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a news conference at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago on Saturday. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation as we had for the last long period of years.”
Trump had announced earlier on Saturday that the U.S. had carried out a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela, capturing Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who Trump said were held on the USS Iwo Jima before being flown to New York to face charges.
The couple arrived at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York, about an hour outside Manhattan, on Saturday evening.
Maduro was then transported by armored vehicle to the Drug Enforcement Administration field office in Manhattan for processing, two sources with direct knowledge of Maduro’s movements told MS NOW.
He was expected to be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, according to six people with knowledge of the matter, until he appears before a federal judge.
Trump did not offer details about how the U.S. will be involved in Venezuela except to say his administration “will be running it with a group.” He did not say when the U.S. involvement in the nation’s government would end or whether there would be elections.
Trump said Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, was sworn in as president after the strike on Saturday. He said Rodriguez spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and that she told him “we’ll do what you need.”
“She had no choice,” Trump said.
However, Rodriguez later issued a statement declaring that Maduro was the “only president of Venezuela” and accusing the U.S. of forcing regime change that would “allow the seizure of our energy resources, our mineral resources, our natural resources.”
Standing behind Trump during the news conference were Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Dan Caine, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and CIA director John Ratcliffe.
“We’re designating various people and we’re going to let you know who those people are,” Trump continued. “It’s largely going to be, for a period of time, the people standing right behind me.”
Asked whether the U.S. military would retain a presence on the ground in Venezuela, Trump rejoined: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground…we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
Trump then suggested that Venezuela’s oil reserves were underutilized by the Maduro government and said U.S. oil companies will take over.
“As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could’ve taken place,” Trump said. “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, the oil infrastructure and start making money for the country.”
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground…we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
President Donald Trump
The president said rebuilding Venezuela— a country of 31 million people that has endured decades of political, social and economic turmoil — could take some time.
“For us to just leave, who’s going to take over?” Trump said. “We have to rebuild their whole infrastructure…We’ll run it properly, we’ll run it professionally.”
Asked how the action in Venezuela comports with Trump and his political movement’s “America First” mantra, Trump said: “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors…we want to surround ourselves with energy…we need that for ourselves, we need that for the world.”
The military operation
Trump announced the attack on his social media platform Truth Social at 4:21 a.m. In an interview with Fox News later, Trump said the operation, which he watched from Mar-a-Lago, was “extremely complex” and involved a number of aircraft. The operation was supposed to take place four days ago but was delayed due to the weather, Trump said, adding, “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show.”
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil Pinto said in a statement about the attack, “Venezuela rejects, repudiates and denounces before the international community the extremely grave military aggression carried out by the current Government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and population.”
On X, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted an unsealed indictment against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, accusing them of “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns” and other charges.
Two law enforcement sources told MS NOW that agents from the FBI’s hostage rescue team embedded with U.S. military special operators from Delta Force, a counterterrorism unit, for the mission. The FBI took custody of Maduro, the people said.
A person familiar with operation told MS NOW that the CIA placed a small team on the ground in Venezuela in August that was able to provide detailed insight into Maduro’s pattern of life that made capturing him “seamless.” Miller, Rubio, Hegseth and Ratcliffe worked on the operation for months, the person said.
Caine said that the operation — which involved more than 150 aircraft across the Western region — infiltrated Maduro’s compound at 1:01 a.m. Eastern time, adding that Maduro and his wife surrendered. He said that no Americans were killed in the operation but did not say whether any Venezuelans had died.
Rubio stated that Maduro had several chances to prevent this result, but “acted like a wild man” and ensured this result.
Congressional reaction
The U.S. has built up significant military force in the region surrounding Venezuela, but Trump did not seek permission from or inform Congress of Saturday’s military action beforehand.
House Democrats scheduled an “emergency virtual caucus meeting” for Sunday afternoon to discuss the developments, according to an invitation obtained by MS NOW.
Rubio, a harsh critic of the Maduro regime, said there was no possibility of notifying Congress about the operation ahead of time.
“We called members of Congress immediately after. This was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on,” Rubio told reporters Saturday. “It was a trigger-based mission in which conditions had to be met night after night; we watched and monitored that for a number of days. So it’s just simply not the kind of mission you can call people and say, ‘Hey, we may do this at some point in the next 15 days.’”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a Trump ally, earlier acknowledged there had been no congressional approval of — or authorization for the use of military force for — prior to the U.S. action.
Lee said he spoke with Rubio, who told him that Maduro had been arrested “by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States” and that the military action “was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.” Lee said such action would fall under the president’s “inherent authority” under Article II of the U.S constitution to protect American personnel.
Vice President JD Vance also defended the administration’s actions, saying Trump offered “multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.”
He also suggested the operation was not illegal, pointing to federal narcoterrorism charges against the Venezuelan leader.
“Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” Vance wrote on X. “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”
Some Republican lawmakers cheered the action.
“Today’s decisive action is this hemisphere’s equivalent to the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” said GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez, who was born in Cuba and represents a heavily Hispanic district in southern Florida. “It’s a big day in Florida, where the majority of Venezuelan, Cuban, & Nicaraguan exiles reside. This is the community I represent & we are overwhelmed with emotion and hope.”
Nonetheless, the operation had already sparked backlash in its early hours as questions swirl about the legal justification for the actions targeting Venezuela.
“No matter the outcome, we are in the wrong for starting this war in Venezuela,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., an Iraq war veteran, on X.
“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress,” posted Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J. “Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”
The United States has for months been building up military forces off the coast of Venezuela, and has targeted dozens of boats in the region in what the White House says is a war against illegal narco-trafficking. It has also intercepted oil tankers in the region in a bid to cut off the country’s largest economic asset.
During his increasingly tense standoff with Maduro, Trump warned of ground operations in Venezuela. The CIA recently struck a dockyard in the country., where Maduro became president in 2013 when then-President Hugo Chavez, who was dying of cancer, designated Maduro as his successor.
Earlier this month, the House narrowly rejected a war powers resolution that would have directed “the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.” In response to the CIA’s drone strike on the Venezuelan dockyard, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the bill’s sponsor, described the actions as “illegal hostilities” and reiterated his view that the “American People don’t want another endless war over oil.”
Similar resolutions have stalled in the Senate, where the 60-vote threshold means even steeper climb.
Julia Jester, Ken Dilanian, David Rhode, Ali Vitali, Marc Santia and Erum Salam contributed to this report.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
Rachel Van Dongen