On January 3, 2026, Operation Absolute Resolve hit military targets around Caracas: a two-hour, 28-minute strike involving roughly 150 aircraft. Delta Force, working from CIA intelligence, captured Maduro during the operation and flew him to New York. He was arraigned January 5 alongside his wife, Cilia Flores, and both pleaded not guilty.

The indictment charges narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation conspiracy, plus weapons counts tied to machine guns and destructive devices allegedly used in furtherance of drug trafficking. Prosecutors allege a pattern stretching back two decades: diplomatic passports sold for drug proceeds while Maduro was foreign minister in 2006; roughly 5.5 tons of cocaine loaded onto a DC-9 at the Caracas airport that same year, later seized by Mexican authorities; a 1.3-ton seizure from a Caracas-to-Paris flight in 2013; cocaine allegedly shipped from the “presidential hangar” by Maduro’s nephews in 2015 and 2016; and meetings with FARC leadership alleged as recently as 2018 through 2020. Two cooperating witnesses, both former Venezuelan military or intelligence officials, have already pleaded guilty. The narco-terrorism count alone carries a mandatory minimum of 20 years, up to life.

Congress never voted to authorize the operation. A Senate resolution to block further military action without congressional approval got 52 votes on January 8 — a majority of the chamber, 15 short of the two-thirds needed to override a veto.

Maduro’s defense isn’t arguing the facts. It’s arguing jurisdiction, on two tracks. The first is status-based: under customary international law, a sitting head of state carries immunity from foreign prosecution simply by virtue of the office, regardless of what any one country thinks of how he holds it. Maduro’s lawyers cite the International Court of Justice’s Arrest Warrant case, which recognized broad immunity for senior officials still in office. Flores makes a parallel claim as his spouse, arguing her immunity “is an attribute of Venezuela’s sovereignty, and only Venezuela may surrender it.”

The second is conduct-based: even if the status claim fails, the lawyers argue, the specific acts named in the indictment — issuing diplomatic passports, deploying the military, conducting foreign policy — were governmental functions attributable to the Venezuelan state, not to Maduro personally. A separate motion challenges the narco-terrorism count on narrower grounds, arguing the indictment doesn’t establish a sufficient legal connection to the United States to support jurisdiction in the first place.

Oral arguments are scheduled for November 17. Trial is set for June 1, 2027. Both defendants have been held in Brooklyn since the January capture.

The United States stopped recognizing Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate president in 2019, following what the government calls a disputed 2018 election. U.S. courts defer to the executive branch on recognition decisions, and prosecutors argue that settles the immunity question under domestic law before international law is even reached. They also point to Noriega: in 1990, the Eleventh Circuit rejected his immunity claim because the U.S. didn’t recognize him and Panama’s government didn’t seek immunity on his behalf either. And however a defendant was captured, prosecutors add, that doesn’t bar the trial that follows — a doctrine a century old, sometimes shorthanded as “badly captured, well detained.” Courts have consistently treated the legality of a capture and the legality of the trial that follows it as separate questions.

Noriega was a military strongman the U.S. never recognized, and one his own government didn’t fight for. Maduro held the actual machinery of the Venezuelan presidency for more than a decade before his capture, and international law’s definition of head-of-state immunity doesn’t ask any single country to sign off on it — it asks whether someone exercises the functions of the office. Whether the U.S. recognizes Maduro settles the question for a U.S. judge; it doesn’t settle the question under the customary international law his lawyers are actually invoking. The stakes outlast this one case, too: a precedent that a president loses his legal protections the moment Washington withdraws recognition is a precedent available to any future administration, against any foreign leader Washington decides not to recognize. And Congress’s authorization question is, in this reading, the more basic problem — the capture happened before anyone resolved whether it was legal in the first place.

1. Whether the judge treats the recognition question as dispositive on its own. A ruling on domestic-law grounds alone would resolve the case without ever reaching the harder international-law arguments.

2. Whether prosecutors lean on the Noriega parallel or try to distinguish this case from it. That parallel is weaker than public statements have suggested, and the defense is already working to widen the gap.

3. Whether Congress revisits its own war-powers question. The fight has moved from the battlefield to the courtroom, where “was this authorized” reads very differently than it did in January.