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The Trump administration is pursuing two very different legal strategies toward the two most powerful figures in Venezuela.
A federal judge set a June 1, 2027, trial date on Wednesday for former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on drug trafficking charges. The couple has been held at a Brooklyn jail since U.S. forces seized them from their Caracas home in a January raid. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Days earlier, the administration told a federal court in Florida that Delcy Rodríguez, the woman Washington recognizes as Venezuela’s acting president, is immune from a $314 million civil judgment tied to the torture of three Americans once held in Venezuela. The Justice Department argued that because the United States recognizes Rodríguez as Venezuela’s sitting head of state, she cannot be held to account in American courts while she remains in office.
The contrast reflects a Venezuela policy that has increasingly pulled in opposite directions. The administration has celebrated Maduro’s removal as a foreign policy triumph while shielding the government that succeeded him, including officials accused of the same repression that defined Maduro’s rule.
Why Trump Is Protecting Delcy Rodríguez While Prosecuting Maduro
“The mixed signals reflect different agendas in the administration,” Benjamin Gedan, a senior fellow and director of the Latin America Program at the Stimson Center and National Security Council director for South America under former President Barack Obama, told Newsweek. “Trump could not be more clear about his interests. He has been delighted to see rising oil production and opportunities for U.S. businesses in the energy and mining sectors, and he’s a big fan of Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s unelected leader.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken a different approach, according to Gedan, who said Rubio spent his Senate career pushing for a political transition in Venezuela and remains reluctant to abandon that fight. Rubio has tried to broker negotiations between the government and the democratic opposition even as the White House has resisted elevating the opposition’s most prominent leader, Gedan said.
“So while Trump is providing legal and public relations services for Delcy, Rubio is trying to engineer negotiations between the regime and the democratic opposition,” Gedan said. “Obviously, Trump’s agenda is most important. So even as the opposition prepares for negotiations, the White House is boxing out the leader of the opposition, reluctant to rock the boat.”
That opposition leader is María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose coalition many observers believe defeated Maduro at the ballot box in July 2024. The Trump administration has discouraged her from returning to Venezuela, according to analysts who track the country closely, out of concern she could complicate the fragile arrangement with Rodríguez.
Laura Dib, director of the Venezuela program at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the legal basis for that arrangement is shakier than the administration suggests. Venezuela’s Supreme Court declared a “forced absence” after Maduro’s capture, a term Dib said does not appear in the Venezuelan constitution, and even under the most flexible reading of that ruling, elections should have been called by July 2. None have been scheduled.
“We are on July 22 without an electoral process,” Dib told Newsweek. “So we are then facing mixed signals. We see a North American government that supports a negotiation process that could lead to the reestablishment of a new National Electoral Council, which is the first precondition for elections, but which, on the other hand, both publicly and in this judicial process, is protecting Delcy Rodríguez.”
Dib dismissed the idea that Washington’s recognition of Rodríguez as head of state could bolster Maduro’s own legal defense, noting that Rubio has repeatedly told Congress that Edmundo González, not Maduro, was Venezuela’s legitimately elected president in 2024. Maduro, she said, was never recognized by the United States, so the immunity argument built around Rodríguez does not extend to him.
“I genuinely believe that the United States is betting on Delcy Rodríguez right now because they consider her the argument for preserving stability,” Dib said. She warned that the strategy risks “stabilizing an authoritarian government instead of creating the conditions that would allow long-term stability and real well-being of Venezuelans.”
Trump’s Venezuela Model Runs Into Trouble in Iran
Trump has repeatedly pointed to Venezuela as a model for how quickly regime change can succeed, a comparison that has grown more pointed as the conflict with Iran has dragged on. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told The New York Times earlier this year. Maduro’s capture led to a rapid pivot by Rodríguez toward Washington.
Iran’s government, propped up by a broader security and clerical apparatus, has not folded as quickly, and the war there has stretched on for months since the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February.
Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher and spokesman for the Venezuela Observatory at Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, said the comparison reflects a preference for narrative over results.
“One of the characteristics of today’s governments is narratives, beyond results and concrete realities,” he said, describing Trump as building a story aimed at his political base that “presents the Venezuelan case as successful” and treats it “as replicable in other countries.”
“The truth is that the case in Venezuela is not successful,” Rodríguez said. “The U.S. authorities today support a regime that violates human rights to remain in power, aligned with the interests not even of the United States, but of certain economic actors very close to President Donald Trump.”
Rodríguez said Trump’s comparison to Iran reflects “a lack of analysis and real calculation,” and that Caracas and Washington are each using the other for their own ends. “The two are not seen as allies, but as actors from whom they can take advantage,” he said.
He said the administration has moved to “give her judicial support to avoid investigations that she clearly has responsibility for,” pointing to her past oversight of Sebin, Venezuela’s intelligence service, which he said was “responsible for the dynamics of torture, persecution and for paying intelligence services outside Venezuela to monitor other states.”
Rodríguez said Washington badly underestimated both Maduro and his successor. “Little by little, Delcy Rodríguez has been giving surprises,” he said, calling her “very skilled at moving” and adept at reading “the narrative needs of the North American authorities.”
Venezuela’s Oil Wealth and Earthquake Recovery Hang in the Balance
The administration’s bet is also commercial. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have led delegations to Venezuela, home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and Washington has rolled back sanctions to let American companies expand production and investment.
Dib cautioned against assuming that opening will translate into broad prosperity. She said Venezuela remains difficult territory for new businesses, citing high levels of bureaucracy, opaque tax rules and a judiciary she described as systemically corrupt, “from the official who charges you money in the prosecutor’s office to the magistrate who charges for a sentence.” Rising oil output, she said, has not yet reached ordinary Venezuelans.
That gap has widened since earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24. Dib said official figures put the death toll above 5,000, with roughly 7,000 people displaced from their homes, though independent estimates run higher. She cited a report from Transparencia Venezuela finding the state deployed only 12 percent of its capacity in the first 48 hours after the quake, a window she called critical for saving lives.
“Venezuelans continue to have an enormous expectation of the role that the United States can play,” Dib said, but she warned that goodwill could erode if oil revenue and American engagement fail to improve daily life. She pointed to public frustration in Venezuela with the country’s interior minister, whom she accused of leading acts of repression against government opponents, as an early sign of that erosion.
Ronal Rodríguez said the earthquakes have already complicated the administration’s preferred narrative, reviving migration pressures that had eased since Maduro’s fall and undercutting the picture of a country stabilizing under new management.
“That circumstance makes them want to sell what has happened in Venezuela as successful,” he said. “Unfortunately for them, the earthquakes do change the equation.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Samantha Beech and Sam Wilson.
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