The Maduro Indictment Appears Legally Solid
Hours after U.S. forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in Caracas, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on X that Maduro would soon “face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” Bondi’s wording aside—typically lawyers understand the legal system as dispensing impartial justice, not “wrath”—the post underscores the administration’s claim that the Venezuelan invasion was justified because the United States was arresting a criminal defendant who has been charged with drug trafficking.
The indictment is relatively straightforward—especially when compared with Maduro’s rendition—and appears legally sound. Although Maduro has a number of options for challenging his prosecution, none of them is a sure bet. Critics of President Donald Trump who have grown used to federal courts checking his worst impulses may find themselves disappointed as the case against Maduro proceeds.
[Gisela Salim-Peyer: ‘Have fun in jail’]
In significant part, the charging document repeats the allegations already set out by the government in a 2020 indictment against the Venezuelan leader, accusing Maduro of involvement in a cocaine-trafficking network stretching across the Western Hemisphere. The specific charges are the same: conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and to collaborate with narco-terrorist organizations to do so. On top of that are also two gun charges. It may sound odd that the United States can charge a foreign leader for possessing machine guns in his own country, but this sort of charge—a gun offense layered on top of an allegation of drug trafficking or violence—is, in contexts not involving heads of sovereign nations, a fairly common tool of federal prosecutors in international drug cases. To the extent that such a tactic seems like an overly broad use of prosecutorial power, that’s a reflection of the expansiveness of U.S. law and the Justice Department’s choice to treat Maduro like an everyday defendant.
The Justice Department has made a few tweaks since 2020, providing more detail on Maduro’s seizure of power after he lost Venezuela’s 2018 election and adding his wife and son to the list of defendants. Whereas the 2020 indictment focuses on Maduro’s alleged collaboration with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Colombian guerrilla group known as FARC, the 2025 version adds a handful of other cartels and drug-trafficking groups to the mix. Newly woven into the indictment is the alleged role of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, whose supposed presence in the U.S. the administration has previously used as a paper-thin excuse to ship Venezuelan migrants to a nightmarish prison in El Salvador.
The government’s claims about Tren de Aragua are probably the most eyebrow-raising aspect of the indictment. “I don’t think of them as major transnational drug trafficker,” Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “It seems a bit surprising.” A critical reader could find other quirks—such as the absence of any mention of fentanyl trafficking, despite the administration’s previous insistence on blaming Maduro for the drug’s abuse by Americans. (Illicit fentanyl largely arrives in the U.S. from China.) But that is a problem for the administration’s public rhetoric, not the viability of the indictment.
Overall, though, the allegations against Maduro seem to more or less line up with what’s already known about the Venezuelan regime’s enmeshment with organized crime. The Trump administration’s reliance on the 2020 indictment is telling here. Those charges were filed by a Justice Department not yet deeply corrupted by the sort of aggressive political interference that has marked the president’s second term thus far, and by federal prosecutors whose Manhattan office was famous for its independence.
Although the indictment seems relatively unscathed by Trump’s signature recklessness, the same cannot be said of the circumstances of Maduro’s capture. Sending military forces into another country’s capital to seize its leader, unprovoked, is forbidden by the United Nations Charter, which prohibits states from using force against one another. The U.S. ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, has pointed to the charter’s exception for self-defense but failed to explain how the Venezuela operation could possibly fall into that category. What’s more, in the absence of congressional authorization—which Trump didn’t have—such an adventure is also likely illegal under all but the most extreme understandings of U.S. law. The administration’s arguments to the contrary depend on an overstretched reading of presidential powers that has been questioned even by advocates of strong executive authority. And while Vice President J. D. Vance pointed to the indictment against Maduro as a justification, the existence of criminal charges against a person does not provide the government with carte blanche to arrest a defendant in any way it likes.
But the dubious nature of his arrival in the U.S. may not help Maduro much in court. The Supreme Court has established repeatedly that even if someone is “kidnapped in the foreign country and brought by force against his will” to the United States, the government can nevertheless try that person in criminal court. In the early 1990s, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega failed to derail his drug-trafficking trial on those grounds after the United States captured and deposed him during the 1989 invasion of Panama.
Eventually, Noriega would be convicted by a South Florida jury and sentenced to 40 years in prison, of which he served 17 before being released and extradited to France for further criminal proceedings. He was the first foreign head of state to be captured by U.S. forces and tried in an American court. Maduro is the second, and Noriega’s other legal arguments offer a preview of what options might be available to Maduro’s defense team.
[George Packer: Iraq was bad. This is absurd.]
“I consider myself a prisoner of war,” Maduro said in court on Monday. Noriega also made this argument. It failed to win him his freedom, but it did allow him to wear his military uniform in court and secured him better prison conditions. Like Noriega, Maduro might also challenge the U.S. government’s ability to bring charges regarding conduct that took place outside the United States. In Noriega’s case, this, too, failed.
Maduro hinted at another potential argument when he insisted before Judge Alvin Hellerstein that he was “still president of my country.” This echoes Noriega’s claim that the United States lacked the authority to put him, as a foreign head of state, on trial and that international law likewise shielded him from criminal prosecution for any actions he had taken in his role as leader of Panama. But both the trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected Noriega’s claims. Maduro may well have a stronger argument: Noriega, unlike Maduro for Venezuela, never legally served as Panama’s head of state under the country’s constitution. Still, despite the protections offered by international law, U.S. courts have tended to defer to the executive branch when it comes to such immunity claims.
The Noriega precedent has been on the books for decades, but its revitalization makes for an odd spectacle in this particular political moment. Trump ordered the arrest of a foreign leader who will now likely stand trial in the U.S. despite the immunity long observed under international law. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling, though, Trump himself enjoys broad immunity from prosecution within the United States. The charges against Maduro may be legitimate, but the upcoming court proceedings—like the ongoing U.S. aggression toward Venezuela—will serve as yet another reminder of Trump’s own power and impunity.