Former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro will appear for his first hearing at a federal court in Manhattan on Monday after a daring US operation extracted him from his country on Saturday.
If he is found guilty, he and his wife, Cilia Flores, could be imprisoned in the US for decades.
Maduro’s capture has drawn significant criticism from US lawmakers and international leaders. Critics of the operation assert that international law doesn’t allow US President Donald Trump to attack a foreign power and kidnap its leader to America to stand trial.
"Maduro is a horrible, horrible person, but you don't treat lawlessness with other lawlessness, and that's what's happened here," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told ABC on Sunday.
"There is no authority ... they did not just do ships off the water. They went inside Venezuela, bombed civilian as well as military places, and it's a violation of the law to do what they did without getting the authorization of Congress.”
“If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) said in a statement.
“What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting a similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president? Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”
However, scholars say that although the arguments could have merit, they will likely not affect Maduro’s legal proceedings in the US federal court.
“Maduro is not going to be able to avoid being brought to trial because he was abducted, so to speak, even if he can establish that it violated international law,” Geoffrey Corn, head of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told The Washington Post.
Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, argued on his Substack that after US forces captured former Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1990, the court upheld the government’s right to try him. Noriega was sentenced to 40 years in prison for drug charges in 1992.
Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States, according to US Attorney-General Pam Bondi.
The indictment against him alleges that he led a scheme in which a “cycle of narcotics-based corruption lines the pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect, and transport tons of cocaine to the United States.”
US authorities are arguing that Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan politicians and military figures worked with drug kingpins to make the country a hub for trafficking. The indictment argues that Maduro and others profited from the partnership.
“In turn, these politicians used the cocaine fueled payments to maintain and augment their political power,” the indictment reads.
The current charges are an update to charges from the first Trump administration in 2020, which effectively made Maduro an international fugitive who risked arrest if he left Venezuela.
In contrast to the earlier indictment, the 2026 document names Flores and Nicolás Ernesto Maduro, the son of the former Venezuelan president, as co-conspirators.
At the time, US leaders agreed that they could not enter Venezuela and abduct him to bring him to court.
US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein will preside over the case. Maduro is expected to appear in court on Monday, but there has been no public announcement of his court date at this time.