2026-01-08 03:13:20
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging—and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.
Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, after the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world—equivalent to about 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute.
“The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” the US president said after Maduro’s extraction from Caracas. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we are going to be reimbursed for everything we spend.”
US oil companies will “spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure… and start making money for the country,” Trump added, with his administration pressing Venezuela’s interim government to delete a law requiring oil projects to be half-owned by the state.
A 50 percent boost in Venezuelan oil production would result in more carbon pollution than major economies like the UK and Brazil emit.
Leading US oil businesses such as Exxon and Chevron have so far remained silent on whether they would spend the huge sums required to enact the president’s vision for Venezuela. But should Venezuela ramp up output to near its 1970s peak of 3.7 million barrels a day—more than triple current levels—it would further undermine the already faltering global effort to limit dangerous global heating.
Even raising production to 1.5 million barrels of oil a day from current levels of around 1 million barrels would produce around 550 million tons of carbon dioxide a year when the fuel is burned, according to Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is more carbon pollution than what is emitted annually by major economies such as the UK and Brazil.
“If there are millions of barrels a day of new oil, that will add quite a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the people of Earth can’t afford that,” said John Sterman, an expert in climate and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The climate costs would be especially high because Venezuela produces some of the world’s most carbon-intensive oil. Its vast reserves of extra-heavy crude are particularly dirty, and its other reserves are “also quite carbon- and methane-intensive,” Mahdavi said.
The world is close to breaching agreed temperature increase limits – already suffering more severe heatwaves, storms and droughts as a result. Increased Venezuelan drilling would further lower global oil prices and slow the needed momentum towards renewable energy and electric cars, Sterman added.
“If oil production goes up, climate change will get worse sooner, and everybody loses, including the people of Venezuela,” he said. “The climate damages suffered by Venezuela, along with other countries, will almost certainly outweigh any short-term economic benefit of selling a bit more oil.”
During his first year back in the White House, Trump has demanded the world remain running on fossil fuels rather than “scam” renewables and has threatened the annexation of Canada, a major oil-producing country, and Greenland, an Arctic island rich with mineral resources.
Critics have accused Trump of a fossil fuel-driven “imperialism” that threatens to further destabilize the world’s climate, as well as upend international politics. “The US must stop treating Latin America as a resource colony,” said Elizabeth Bast, the executive director of Oil Change International. “The Venezuelan people, not US oil executives, must shape their country’s future.”
Patrick Galey, head of fossil fuel investigations at the climate and justice NGO Global Witness, said Trump’s aggression in Venezuela is “yet another conflict fuelled by fossil fuels, which are overwhelmingly controlled by some of the world’s most despotic regimes.”
“So long as governments continue to rely on fossil fuels in energy systems, their constituents will be hostage to the whims of autocrats,” he said.
Though the president’s stated vision is for US-based oil companies to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves for profit, making good on that promise may be complicated by economic, historical and geological factors, experts say.
Oil companies may not be “eager to invest what’s needed because it will take a lot longer than the three years of President Trump’s term”, said Sterman. “That’s a lot of risk—political risk, project risk,” he said. “It seems very tricky.”
Upping production is “also just a bad bet generally”, said Galey. “Any meaningful increase in current production would require tens of billions of investment in things like repairs, upgrades and replacing creaking infrastructure,” he said. “That’s not even taking into account the dire security situation.”
“The heavy Venezuelan crude that could be refined in US Gulf coast installations is likely going to undercut domestic producers.”
Venezuela’s oil production has fallen dramatically from its historical highs—a decline experts blame on both mismanagement and US sanctions imposed by Barack Obama and escalated by Trump. By 2018, the country was producing just 1.3m barrels a day—roughly half of what it produced when Maduro took office in 2013, just over a third of what it produced in the 1990s, and about a third of its peak production in the 1970s.
Trump has said US companies will revive production levels and be “reimbursed” for the costs of doing so. But the economics of that expansion may not entice energy majors, and even if they choose to play along, it would take years to meaningful boost extraction, experts say.
Boosting Venezuela’s oil output by 500,000 barrels a day would cost about $10bn and take roughly two years, according to Energy Aspects. Production could reach between 2 million and 2.5 million barrels a day within a decade by tapping medium crude reserves, Mahdavi said. But returning to peak output would require developing the Orinoco Belt, whose heavy, sulfur-rich crude is far more costly and difficult to extract, transport and refine.
Returning to 2 million barrels per day by the early 2030s would require about $110 billion in investment, according to Rystad Energy, an industry consultancy.
“That is going to take much more time and much more money, to be able to get at or close to maybe 3, 4 or 5 million barrels a day of production,” said Mahdavi.
Increasing Venezuelan extraction amid booming US production may also be a hard sell. “The heavy Venezuelan crude that could be refined in US Gulf coast installations is likely going to undercut domestic producers, who until Trump kidnapped Maduro had been vocally supportive of sanctions on Venezuelan oil,” said Galey.
Some firms may be willing to “eat that uncertainty” because the US plans to provide companies with financial support to drill in Venezuela, said Mahdavi.
“If you’re willing to deal with the challenges…you are looking still at relatively cheap crude that will get you a higher profit margin than what you can do in the United States,” he said. “That’s why they’re still interested: It’s way more expensive to drill in, say, the US’s Permian Basin.”
Some US oil majors may be more receptive to Trump’s Venezuela strategy. Chevron, the only US company operating in the country, may be poised scale up production faster than its rivals. And ExxonMobil, which has invested heavily in oil production within neighboring Guyana, could benefit from the removal of Maduro, who staunchly opposes that expansion.
Overall, however, it remains unclear how US oil majors will respond to Trump’s plans of regime change and increased oil extraction in Venezuela. What is much clearer is that any expansion would be “terrible for the climate, terrible for the environment,” said Mahdavi.
2026-01-08 02:27:39
Reporting from Miami on Tuesday, newly minted CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil dedicated a lauding segment to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Dokoupil, who started on the job this week after years as a co-anchor on CBS’s morning show, began the approximately one-minute segment by listing off all the roles that Rubio has assumed in the Trump administration. In addition to his job overseeing the Department of State, Rubio is also the interim national security adviser, the acting national archivist, and head of the now-gutted US Agency for International Development, or USAID, before handing it off to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. (Dokoupil didn’t mention USAID’s demise or the Vought handoff.)
“Whatever you think of his politics,” Dokoupil said on Tuesday, “you got to admit, it’s an impressive résumé.”
Stepping into the job this week, Dokoupil takes over a role that has been held by Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Katie Couric. Dokoupil’s evening anchor position comes as CBS News continues to be reshaped by new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. Since Weiss, an opinion writer who started the Free Press website, began her tenure, she has heavily altered the political tone of the network, and, most notably, pulled a 60 Minutes segment on Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a torturous prison in El Salvador.
During his Rubio segment, Dokoupil referenced AI-generated images of the secretary that have been going viral online. “AI memes have added to that portfolio,” he continued after listing Rubio’s various government roles, “casting secretary Rubio as the new Governor of Minnesota, the new Shah of Iran, the Prime Minister of Greenland, the new manager of Manchester United, the head of Hilton Hotels, and highest of high honors of all, the new Michelin Man.”
Dokoupil shows the images and lists them in a seemingly comedic tone. He doesn’t, though, explain the context—or news—behind these jokes.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced this week that he would no longer seek reelection amid investigations into social service fraud and the Trump administration’s targeting of his state’s Somali population through immigration enforcement. Rubio is currently shepherding the president’s purported plan to acquire control over Greenland. Just this week, the Department of Homeland Security accused a Minneapolis Hilton hotel of refusing to accept the bookings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—leading Hilton Worldwide Holdings to remove the local hotel from their system.
After listing the memes, Dokoupil said, “back in real life of course, these memes may not add up to much” before continuing, “but for Rubio’s hometown fans, who are many around here in Miami, it is a sign of how Florida, once an American punchline, has become a leader on the world stage.”
He ended the segment by speaking directly to the secretary. “Marco Rubio, we salute you,” he said, “you’re the ultimate Florida Man.” The White House’s rapid response X page then shared Dokoupil’s segment with a simple message: “WE LOVE @SecRubio!”
2026-01-08 00:56:49
Word of the US military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reached Mayra Sulbaran while on vacation in Canada. Sulbaran—who fled Venezuela in September 2018 and lives in Washington, DC—was in Montreal to reunite with her brother, who she had not seen in nine years. “I was hugging him when we found out,” she told me over a Zoom on Monday morning.
Soon after Sulbaran heard the news, she joined other Venezuelans to celebrate what so many have prayed for and thought they might never see happen: the downfall of Maduro.
“Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back.”
Last weekend, US forces executed a months-in-the-making incursion into the presidential compound in Caracas to extract the Venezuelan strongman and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are now being held in a Brooklyn jail facing drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump declared the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” What happens next remains unclear. At first, Trump hinted at “boots on the ground,” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked of “leverage” to control the country.The US president also warned Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as interim leader, that she would pay a bigger “price” than the removed president “if she doesn’t do what’s right.”
For so many Venezuelans like Sulbaran—a lawyer and pro-democracy activist who founded Casa DC Venezuela, a cultural center for the Venezuelan diaspora in the Washington, DC area—this fraught moment is filled with a complex mix of relief, dread, and expectation.
“It’s a very contradictory situation because we understand that [President Donald Trump] has a goal and we appreciate it…,” she said, “but we’re also very afraid because we don’t know what’s coming and whether a democratic process will truly be respected.”
Sulbaran is one of 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country since 2014, part of the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history and one of the world’s worst forced displacement crises. For Venezuelans living in exile and scattered across the hemisphere and beyond, this juncture has sparked hope of one day returning to a Venezuela freed from Maduro’s oppressive grip. But it has also instilled anxiety among the thousands of Venezuelans—even those cheering the US operation—facing deportation to a nation now influx where their safety is all but guaranteed.
“Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back,” said Sulbaran, now a US permanent resident. “It’s not just about changing a government, it’s about addressing an economic, social, and moral structure.” With the Maduro regime’s chain of command still ruling the country, she said the United States should offer protection to Venezuelans.
Since retaking office, Trump has done the opposite. He has vilified and singled out Venezuelan migrants as a threat, accusing them of being gang members and taking over American cities.
Last year, his administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a discretionary reprieve from deportation for immigrants from countries stricken by natural disasters, wars, and other circumstances—for Venezuela, claiming conditions in the country had improved and allowed for people’s safe return. As I wrote then, that move impacted more than 600,000 Venezuelans and represented the largest de-legalization campaign in modern US history. It threw thousands of people into a legal limbo, with many losing legal status and the ability to work.
Now, amidst the ousting of Venezuela’s sitting president and a nationwide crackdown by the regime, there appears to be no plan to halt the deportation of Venezuelans. In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked if the administration would continue to send Venezuelans back to the country. “Venezuela today is more free than it was yesterday,” Noem said, adding that the Venezuelans who were stripped of TPS have “the opportunity to apply for refugee status.”
But the refugee program, which the Trump administration has gutted, is intended for people who apply for protection from outside of the United States, not those present in the country already, like one-time Venezuelan TPS holders. In response to questions from Mother Jones, a DHS spokesperson conceded that “applicants are only eligible for refugee status prior to entering the country,” which excludes the people Noem said could qualify.
“Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love,” the spokesperson said. “[Deportation] Flights are not paused.” (In 2025, the US government deported 14,310 Venezuelans back to their home country, according to a flight tracker initiative kept by Human Rights First.)
Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, called on the Trump administration to restore TPS for Venezuelans. “This is not the right time to keep deporting law-abiding Venezuelan immigrants,” she said. “All of these vulnerable people that have already been hunted, discriminated against, and victims of all of these xenophobic and racist immigration decisions are in more danger than ever before.”
Ferro pointed to a decree by the Venezuelan regime ordering the police to identify and arrest “everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.” There are reports of armed gangs patrolling streets and setting up checkpoints to question residents and look through their phones. On Monday, fourteen journalists were detained, according to the National Press Workers Union. If Venezuela descends into further instability, it could also push more people to leave the country.
In that climate, Ferro expressed concern about what might happen to Venezuelans who celebrated the operation on the streets of the United States if they were deported back. “People are more terrified than before,” she said. “The ultimate hope is that there is a real goal of bringing back democracy for Venezuela and, as a consequence, the Venezuelans that are willing to go back can do it in a safe manner. But that’s not the case right now.”
At first, Ferro said she felt relief, joy, and a “sense of justice” to see Maduro removed from power. But following President Trump’s initial press conference, and Rodríguez ascent, that was overtaken by “disbelief, shock, frustration, devastation.” She took issue with the US government’s sidelining of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and backing of Rodríguez. (Machado, who the Venezuelan regime barred from running in the 2024 presidential elections when Maduro declared victory despite evidence that the opposition candidate Edmundo González was the legitimate winner, has said she plans to return to Venezuela “as soon as possible.”)
“At the end of the day, we’re not free,” Ferro added. “The opposition leadership was asking for the construction of a transition to democracy, not a long-term negotiation with a dictatorship.” Ferro said she had questions about what it means for the United States to “run” Venezuela, too—even if temporarily, as Trump promised.
“What I know for sure is that the people of every country have the right to decide their own future,” she said. “Venezuelans have been waiting for more than a decade—if you talk about Chavismo, 27 years—and fighting to decide our own future. We have voted. We have protested. We have been killed. We have been persecuted. We have been imprisoned. We have been tortured. We have done everything in our power to have a path to democracy, and we deserve that opportunity.”
Nathaly Maestre, who lives in Maryland with her partner and six-month-old baby, said there’s “a lot of tension and fear” in Venezuela right now. Her mother avoids leaving the house in an area where the pro-government armed civilian groups known as colectivos are active. They worry about having their conversations monitored and have stopped exchanging messages over WhatsApp, using phone calls instead. “The situation is worrisome because they’re intimidating people,” she said.
After fleeing Venezuela, Maestre sought asylum in the United States and later applied for TPS as another layer of protection. Since the Trump administration ended the program, she’s now reliant on her pending asylum case. Some of her relatives lost their full-time jobs as a result of not having legal status. But despite their vulnerable position, she said they have no plans to leave because Venezuela isn’t safe, perhaps even less so now. “I think we’ve awakened a monster that will now turn against civil society and against anyone who expresses an opinion,” Maestre said. She thinks, at best, it’ll take time for the country to really change.
During our call, Sulbaran also rejected a simplistic narrative that paints the reactions of Venezuelans to Maduro’s capture in broad strokes. She described Chavismo—the political movement of socialist leader Hugo Chávez—and the authoritarian government of his successor as a “farce.” Maduro, she said, is a “dictator” who oversaw a money-laundering “narco-state” as the Venezuelan people fell into extreme poverty and faced political oppression and violence. “We experienced firsthand, as a couple and as a family, what it meant to leave Venezuela to preserve our lives and the lives of our children,” she said.
But Sulbaran also tries to remain clear-eyed about the risks that may lie ahead. She worries that the result of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela and ousting of Maduro could just be the exchange of one “executioner” for another. Her hope is that Rodríguez will engage in a peaceful transition period before handing the reigns of the country to the duly elected González. “Yes, we’re nervous,” she said. “But we’ve come from the worst, from rock bottom.”
2026-01-07 20:30:00
It’s the judge who first tips off Daniela that something is wrong.
“I am pretty certain that you won’t be coming back to my court,” he tells her and another asylum seeker from Colombia—let’s call her Isabella. (All of the immigrants in this story are identified by pseudonyms, for obvious reasons.)
They’d come to San Francisco one morning at the end of July for a routine asylum hearing, but things had recently become anything but routine. “This is a fairly new thing that Homeland Security is doing,” Judge Patrick O’Brien continues, referring to a motion by an attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security to dismiss both cases.
Daniela knows Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been detaining some asylum seekers after court hearings, but her boyfriend, Andres, hadn’t been overly worried. You never knew with President Donald Trump, he’d said, but she’d filed her asylum application on time and had never committed a crime—never even a speeding ticket! Daniela wasn’t so sure. In any case, she’d risen before dawn to make the 8:30 a.m. court date. She donned a white skirt suit and white kitten heels and left home at 5 a.m.
It was good she had. “Traffic was terrible,” she tells Andres over the phone as she pulls into a downtown parking lot. She sprints several blocks in those heels to reach the federal building on Sansome Street, near the iconic Transamerica Pyramid.
After going through security, Daniela rides the elevator to the fourth floor, walks down a narrow hallway, and turns into the courtroom.
Immigration court is a civil process, not a criminal one, so asylum seekers aren’t provided a lawyer free of charge. In San Francisco, most do secure one at some point, but rarely for these master calendar hearings during which the judge simply confirms some basic facts. The final hearing, a longer private affair in which the person makes their case to stay in the United States, comes later— often much later.
That’s because US immigration courts are on the brink. O’Brien’s courtroom, the size of a small elementary school classroom, is certainly hectic—seating area packed, toddlers and babies wailing. Three local journalists, myself included, are squeezed into the last row nearest the exit. The judge at one point gets tied up on hold with a dial-in service seeking an interpreter for Mam, a Mayan language.
The case backlog is epic: As of September (the most recent data available), nearly 2.3 million asylum cases were queued up nationwide, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Things are only going to get worse. Since early in Trump’s second term, his administration has fired about 100 immigration judges, including more than half of San Francisco’s bench. Five would be abruptly dismissed by email at the end of November. Four more—including O’Brien—were slated to retire by early this year.
The administration plans to replace some of the fired judges across the country—perhaps unlawfully—with military lawyers. The remaining San Francisco judges, along with courthouse staff, were recently told that the main San Francisco courthouse will be shut down next year and they will be transferred across the bay to serve at the immigration court in Concord. Until then, the holdovers will be saddled with the dockets of sacked colleagues. Jeremiah Johnson, one of the five fired in San Francisco in November, told me he’d already been hearing the cases of a judge who’d gotten the boot in September.
After Daniela sits down, O’Brien admonishes three other asylum seekers who scurry in late. (They’d been directed to a different location.) He calls up a couple who had driven from Oregon with their infant and toddler for their hearing. Eventually, he summons Daniela and Isabella, who’d never met. She knew from his tone, she told me later, that she was in trouble.
When he tells them the DHS lawyer has moved to dismiss their cases, my heart sinks. I’d first heard about this tactic a month earlier while covering courts for the nonprofit newsroom Mission Local. Then I witnessed it: The government lawyer makes a motion to dismiss. The asylum seeker—in that case, a gay man in his 20s claiming persecution in Colombia—is arrested outside the courtroom. I watched federal agents load him, handcuffed, into a van waiting outside.
San Francisco has yet to experience the heavy-handed raids the administration has initiated in numerous US cities, notes Milli Atkinson, an immigration attorney at the Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco, a nonprofit that helps immigrants get access to legal assistance. Instead, ICE has been arresting people in courthouse hallways. I’ve witnessed dozens of such arrests now. Not criminals, not the “worst of the worst,” as Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have falsely and repeatedly claimed. Just regular people trying to escape violence and oppression.
The attorney usually present in O’Brien’s courtroom dispensing free legal advice and warning immigrants who have motions to dismiss that they will probably be arrested is absent this morning. I figure Daniela and Isabella are in for a shock.
In fact, Daniela told me later, she was pretty sure ICE would try to detain her. She just thought it would happen on the street. She’d planned to go to the restroom across the hall, call Andres, and they would figure out what to do.
Instead, as she steps out the courtroom door with Isabella, ICE is upon them—a handful of agents, some clad in jackets with “Police” emblazoned on the back. They call Daniela’s name.
Si?
“You’re under arrest,” they say in English.
They spin the women around and cuff them. Both are crying. Daniela catches my eye and says something I couldn’t make out. She tried to ask whether I would call her family. I shake my head, not comprehending: “Soy periodista—I’m a journalist, I can’t do anything.”
The agents marches them through an unmarked door leading to a freight elevator. They take Daniela to a field office two floors up, where they confiscate her purse, documents, cellphone, car keys—even her clothes, giving her a gray sweatsuit to wear. She is allowed a call. She dials Andres just before 10 a.m.
“Don’t panic,” she says in Spanish, her voice breaking. “I’ve been captured. I cannot speak for long. I’m afraid they’re going to deport me.” She needs him to pick up the car. She tells him where. Then she hangs up.
Andres calls his sister at home in the extended family’s cozy apartment in Santa Clara County. Maria is the family’s problem solver. She starts working the phones. On Telemundo, she’d heard about a service, the Rapid Response Network, that offers free legal advice to immigrants. She calls and explains what happened to the person who answers. They say they’ll call back.
A Spanish-speaking lawyer calls back around 10:45. To the family’s immense relief, she says she is there with Daniela at the ICE field office. Then the lawyer asks when Daniela entered the country.
May 2024.
Her tone changes. Under the new rules, the lawyer informs them, anyone in the United States less than two years can be arrested and deported. This proclamation quashes their hopes. Andres had been fired up for a fight; he was sure he could get Daniela released. Now, Maria thought, it felt as though they were speaking with an ICE representative. “Can Daniela hear me?” she inquires. The lawyer says yes.
“Do whatever they want,” Maria advises her. “Say you will leave the country. Do what you have to do to get out of detention as soon as possible.”
To understand why law-abiding asylum seekers are being arrested, consider Trump’s campaign promises. During his first run, he vowed to “build the wall.” The second time around, his promise was far more extreme: He pledged to deport 20 million undocumented immigrants, though only about 14 million are estimated to be living in the United States. “Let’s start with a million,” running mate JD Vance told ABC News in August 2024, “and then we can go from there.”
In May, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller set an ICE arrest quota of 3,000 immigrants a day—about a million a year. That’s more than double the record 400,000-plus annual deportations under President Barack Obama. In October, when it became clear that ICE wouldn’t hit its numbers, the Trump administration walked back that goal and announced a leadership shake-up, replacing key regional ICE leaders with personnel from US Customs and Border Protection, an agency known for aggressive tactics.
Trump officials insist they are focusing on hardened criminals—including “child rapists,” according to Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, whom the administration recruited to help coordinate its amped-up efforts. In reality, despite the unprecedented $75 billion Congress approved to help ICE arrest and detain people, there probably aren’t a million unauthorized immigrants with criminal records to target.
Nearly three-quarters of the people booked into ICE custody from October 1 through the end of November had no criminal convictions, according to an analysis by David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. Among those who do, most convictions are for things like gambling and traffic violations, not violent crimes. In fact, people without criminal convictions have been driving the increase in ICE book-ins; Bier found that, compared with October 2024 through April 2025, 80 percent of the increase in daily book-ins were people without any criminal conviction.
A New Yorker analysis points to May 2025 as the month ICE began arresting more people without criminal records than with. It’s also when the San Francisco courthouse arrests commenced. Now, Bier told me, the administration’s priority “is exclusively on the numbers and how many deportations they can get and how many arrests they can get—and the easiest way to make arrests is to go to immigration courts.”
My Mission Local colleagues and I have compiled a fairly comprehensive list of ICE’s courthouse arrests in San Francisco. From late May until Thanksgiving, there were almost 100, most of which we witnessed firsthand. The national picture is murkier. Joseph Gunther, an independent researcher based in New York, analyzed ICE and immigration court data suggesting that nearly 3,000 people were arrested after immigration hearings from May through mid-October, the most recent data available. Gunther suspects this is an undercount.
Daniela had never planned to come to the United States—until her life was upended in April 2024. She was 27 and working at a cellphone store in a major Colombian city. She’d hoped to attend university and study psychology—maybe marketing—but work kept interfering, she later wrote in her asylum application.
One Saturday that month, a man came into the store with a cellphone he needed unlocked. He was agitated. She took the phone and said to come back Monday to give the technician time to check it out. The man seemed frustrated and impatient. He said he’d check back at the end of the day.
Hours later, two male police officers showed up in search of a phone of the same make and model. They didn’t have a warrant. Daniela said to come back when they had one. The officers left.
The first man didn’t return that day—or Monday or Tuesday. On Wednesday, Daniela got curious and opened the cellphone, which the tech had successfully unlocked. It contained a video of the same two police officers. They were sexually assaulting a woman. Daniela was shocked.
She Googled the name of the man who’d left the phone and found his Facebook page. She messaged him. He didn’t respond. But public posts on his feed suggested that he knew the woman and that she was missing. The posts were asking for people’s help finding her.
That evening, Daniela walked to the nearest police station to file a report. The cops were unhelpful. She’d have to file online, they said, so she headed home. When she arrived at her door, someone called her name. She turned around, and a man had a gun pointed at her face. He pulled the trigger.
“I did not immigrate for economic reasons,” Maria wrote in her application, but “the Colombian state did not protect me.”
The gun seemed to malfunction, sparing her, Daniela wrote. She screamed. Neighbors emerged, and the man fled. Daniela left town as soon as she could, heading north. A month later, she crossed from Mexico into the United States. There didn’t seem to be any Border Patrol agents around. She could try her luck without documentation, her smuggler said, or walk four hours to the nearest CBP office and request asylum. She chose the latter. It was a no-brainer, she told me later. If she followed the rules, she would be able to remain in the United States legally. Breaking the rules never crossed her mind, she said.
She met Andres about two weeks later in the Bay Area. She was doing, Daniela admits, a truly horrific job of parking outside a Cheesecake Factory. Andres helped. Then he got her number. Their first date was at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, an amusement park by the ocean.
Andres, too, was an asylum seeker, a lawyer back in Colombia. He’d run for local office in his hometown on an anti-corruption platform, promising to address officials’ ties to organized crime. Maria, his sister, ran his campaign. Their experience was a lot like Daniela’s. Maria was arriving home one day in 2022 when a man on a motorcycle stopped her outside her house, according to her asylum application and police reports filed with Colombian authorities. The man lifted his shirt to reveal a gun. He said to tell her brother hello. If Andres didn’t cease his political activities, he said, he would come for her.
She left town that day. Two months later, a different man threatened her brother—also with a gun, which jammed. That’s what compelled the whole family to flee: Andres, Maria’s husband and their son, and their aunt. “Tia,” as everyone calls her, insisted on wearing heels as she scrambled through a hole in the border fence. They still laugh about it: She was determined to make a good first impression.
“I did not immigrate for economic reasons,” Maria wrote in Spanish in her application. “I had a stable life in Colombia.” But “the Colombian state did not protect me. Despite my filing official reports, the authorities did not guarantee my security.”
I turn up at the family’s apartment the afternoon of Daniela’s arrest. Asylum seekers are so meticulously documented that their home addresses are read aloud in court. I’ve brought along a Spanish-speaking co-worker to help interpret.
I hear music first. The front door is wide open.
I think: Who leaves their door open when a relative was just taken?
Tia does. We knock on the door frame: “Hello, is this Daniela’s house?” Tia hurries over. “What do you know about Daniela?” she cries in Spanish.
Maria and Andres were in San Francisco picking up Daniela’s effects and searching for her car. Tia invites us in, and we sit on black leather sofas in the living room. She’s the matriarch, having raised Maria and Andres. The apartment has a little dining nook with a table and chairs. Telemundo is always on in the background. One wall is adorned with rows of certifications Maria has earned that allow her to help other immigrants fill out documents.
Tia, who knows about Daniela’s arrest, calls Maria and has her speak with my co-worker. She offers water: sparkling or tap? I tell her what I witnessed. “Did Daniela have a jacket? Was she cold?” Tia demands.
She thinks of Isabella, whom none of us know. She will pray for her, too, she says.
Back at the ICE field office, the women were placed in a cell. Daniela was indeed cold. Her only food in the 20-odd hours she would spend there was two “burritos”—just a smear of beans on a tortilla—an energy bar, and small bottles of water.
She couldn’t sleep: “I stayed awake and talked to Isabella, and I cried.”
“A motion to dismiss when someone wants to have their day in court—it seemed disingenuous to me,” said a recently fired immigration judge.
An ICE officer came by early the next morning. The officer didn’t speak Spanish, but she made it clear that Daniela was being moved. She fanned herself to indicate the destination: somewhere hot. Then she undulated her arms like a hula dancer. “Aloha,” she said.
There are no long-term ICE detention facilities in the Bay Area, so immigrants arrested at local immigration courts are sent elsewhere—to Bakersfield, California, or sometimes to Texas or Louisiana. But even veteran immigration attorneys were surprised when I told them where Daniela ended up.
She was loaded into a van with four other asylum seekers, led through security at San Francisco International Airport, and placed on a United flight to Honolulu. She remembers travelers staring at them. She was crying—and cuffed the entire flight, even in the bathroom, she told me.
In Honolulu, two ICE agents loaded her into another van. In broken English, she begged one of them to let her call her family. He seemed moved. He pulled over and handed her his cellphone. Make it fast, he said. She dialed Andres.
“Amor!” He yelled upon hearing her voice.
“I’m in Hawaii. I can’t talk,” she said. She hung up.
Maria got right to work. There weren’t any ICE detention facilities near the Honolulu airport. But a local paper had reported that ICE was contracting with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to house detainees in the city. Maria eventually found the prison.
She tells me all this at the family dining table three days after Daniela was taken. Telemundo is on as always; Trump and Noem pop up onscreen occasionally. Tia sits on a couch nearby.
Maria has a Google Maps printout of Daniela’s location. She’s contacted a Honolulu church and asked whether they might check on her to make sure she’s okay. All she wants for Daniela, Maria says, is a dignified return to Colombia. She has no hope of her staying in the United States.
Andres calls and says something to Maria, who starts to cry—happy tears. She puts the phone on speaker and breaks the news: “Daniela is pregnant!”
Tia jumps up. “This is a sign you are meant to be together!”
Later, Andres tells me the news made him happy, but it was tempered by a painful realization: “I can’t go back to Colombia,” he keeps saying.
The other family members were determined to keep fighting for their asylum, but they’d already accepted that Daniela wasn’t coming back, and Andres’ little family would be separated before it could even begin.
Daniela’s targeting, immigration experts told me, likely had to do with expedited removal, a process that lets authorities fast-track deportations without putting the person in front of a judge.
It was traditionally used for people in the country less than two weeks and detained within 100 miles of the border—someone, for instance, who comes across to find work, encounters a Border Patrol agent, and admits they aren’t seeking asylum. But after Trump was re-elected, DHS officials said they would use expedited removal “to its fullest extent.” Now it would apply to anyone anywhere in the country who’d arrived within the last two years.
Trump had tried to impose this policy during his first term, but it got tied up in court and was never fully implemented. In late August, a federal judge temporarily blocked this second attempt as well. (A US circuit court began hearing the government’s appeal December 9; the timeline for a decision is unknown.) But that temporary respite came a month too late for Daniela.
There are legitimate reasons for the government to dismiss an asylum case: The person had some other way of qualifying for residency, for example, or the case was a low-priority affair that could be handled via a separate process. Asylum seekers sometimes seek dismissals, too. In the past, “I did not have any qualms about granting those cases,” explains Johnson, the San Francisco immigration judge who was fired in November, but “a motion to dismiss when someone wants to have their day in court—it seemed disingenuous to me.”
“If they fly me back to Colombia, I won’t even leave the airport.”
Judges who do have qualms are under considerable pressure to comply. US immigration courts are overseen by a division of the Department of Justice, which sent out guidance in May instructing immigration judges to rule immediately on dismissal motions without allowing, as is more typical, time after the hearing for the immigrant to respond. The guidance was walked back, but the message was clear: Grant the motions, according to former San Francisco Immigration Judge Shira Levine, who was fired in September. A lack of case law on the issue, Levine says, coupled with the DOJ directive—not to mention the firings—may well make some judges more compliant.
Johnson is concerned about what comes next. After a dismissal, the asylum seeker no longer has an active case, so they lose their legal protection against deportation. This lets federal agents treat them basically as though they’d just crossed the border and place them in expedited removal. Even when judges refuse to grant an immediate dismissal—as O’Brien did in Daniela’s case—ICE tends to arrest the person anyway.
Expedited removal doesn’t apply in such cases, but that may not matter, because ICE does have some powers to detain noncitizens—even those with active asylum cases. Daniela, facing the prospect of indefinite detention, waived her right to asylum and asked to leave the country. I’ve spoken to three other asylum seekers arrested in San Francisco who did the same.
Isabella got lucky. That first day, while she and Daniela sat in the ICE holding cell, her brother wandered, distraught, into a law firm nearby. The firm specialized in other things, but a handful of its attorneys did pro bono immigration work. One was Erin Meyer.
Meyer decided to try a long shot: a habeas corpus petition. This is how student protesters, including Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, got out of detention last year. The argument is that Isabella was detained in violation of her Fifth Amendment right of due process. When she crossed initially into the United States, the Border Patrol arrested her, determined she wasn’t a flight risk, and let her go. Isabella—like most San Francisco asylum seekers, Meyer told me—hadn’t committed any crimes, so the government had no lawful reason to rearrest her.
Meyer filed the habeas petition the morning after the arrest, then proceeded to file for a temporary restraining order to get Isabella out of ICE custody. By this time, Isabella, too, was en route to Honolulu. But by the time her plane landed, a federal district judge had granted the restraining order. Meyer’s firm booked Isabella on a return flight that night.
Habeas petitions quickly became the norm in such situations, at least in San Francisco. Lawyers began staking out courtrooms and starting the process before the immigrant was even arrested. Had Daniela’s hearing been a few weeks later, she and Andres might still be together.
![A woman stands in front of a line of police in riot gear, holding a handwritten sign above her head. The sign reads: "We are children of a mother that was taken away from us in the early 2000 [sic]. This is personal. We rise up for the new generation without a voice that are losing their parents today!"](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/6-9-24ICEprotestColinPeck-18.jpeg)
What Andres thought about most in the wake of Daniela’s arrest was the money. The money for Daniela to call him from prison. The money they would need for the baby to come.
Today, it was money for flights. Daniela had just finished her voluntary departure process. This would keep a removal order—which would make it harder to reenter the country legally—off her record. Andres hopes to get asylum, marry Daniela, and bring her and their child back to California. Plenty of things could prevent that, the Justice and Diversity Center’s Atkinson told me. Meanwhile, another key path to asylum—for people who didn’t encounter CBP and applied through US Citizenship and Immigration Services—has been frozen. The administration officially put it on hold December 2, after an Afghan immigrant shot two National Guard troops in DC, killing one of them.
Daniela had been in lockup about a week before a federal judge gave her permission to leave the country. It would be two more before she boarded a flight to Colombia. That may sound like a long delay, but I’ve interviewed people who were incarcerated much longer after requesting voluntary removal. Andres and Maria think the pregnancy helped move things along. Also, Maria had followed up nonstop with a Honolulu-based ICE officer.
Back in California, Tia packed Daniela’s things into five boxes stacked in the living room: shoes, purses, makeup and accessories, regular clothes, and athletic clothing. Daniela thought she’d be free once she arrived in Panama, a layover en route to Colombia. Instead, she had to wait until everyone else deplaned, and someone came to escort her to the next gate. Even upon landing in Colombia, she was told to stay put. A Colombian official came and got her and walked her through customs. Finally, the official stamped her passport and handed it over: “Welcome home.”
The last time I saw Andres was in October, more than two months after Daniela’s arrest. It was his 42nd birthday—the day he’d planned to propose to Daniela. He had intended to pop the question in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland. Tia would sneak photos of the moment.
Instead, he was at the family apartment, FaceTiming his love during an informal gathering with his sister, aunt, brother-in-law, and nephew. He opened a birthday card, had a slice of cake. Daniela was doing well enough. Fearful of returning to the city where she’d been threatened, she was living in the countryside and keeping a low profile. (Andres would end up proposing over the phone, after Daniela revealed the baby will be a girl. They plan to name her after Maria and Andres.)
The front door of the apartment was open as usual. Still, things felt different. Andres apologized for his mood. He was tired, he told me. He works three jobs. From 3 to 11 a.m., he’s a dispatcher at a local factory. From 11 a.m. until 4 p.m., he drives for a ride-hailing service. After a break, he works until 8:30 p.m. or so doing food delivery, gets home around 9, and goes straight to sleep. This was his first time off in a while.
There was something else. Andres says he no longer feels welcome in the United States. He watches the news, sees the arrests. He feels like people view him as a criminal. Maria feels much the same—though her son, now fully bilingual in English and Spanish, is thriving in elementary school. The silver lining of Daniela being back in Colombia, Andres said, was that his child won’t be around people who don’t want her.
Maria and Andres are less likely to be arrested at their hearings than Daniela was, but they’re still terrified to go to court. They have been here more than two years, and such people are seldom arrested at court or flagged for expedited removal, Atkinson says—though everything is a coin toss with this administration.
The courthouse arrests have slowed down nationwide since September. Experts aren’t quite sure why. The ongoing lawsuits may be a factor. It’s also possible that ICE has shifted to targeting immigrants in other less public settings, such as green card interviews or interviews during which asylum seekers try to establish a “credible fear” of returning home—an early step in some people’s processes. A new DHS strategy also seems to have emerged: Its lawyers are now asking judges to deport immigrants to third countries, arguing that they can seek asylum there instead.
Daniela had written in her asylum application that, beyond her need for security, she wanted to be an American. She was eager to start working legally, she wrote in Spanish, “and receive a Social Security Number to start paying taxes, which are the foundation of the quality of life in this country, and in this way begin to contribute my small grain of sand to this beautiful nation.”
Both Andres and Maria had once shared that idealism. But on that day in the apartment, Andres’ birthday, the life he’d imagined seemed further away than ever. That best-case scenario of living with his family legally in California is years away at best. His final hearing is scheduled for 2027, and with judicial firings and the legal immigration process in disarray, that timing is far from certain.
Maria’s final hearing is years out, too. The thought of not getting asylum, for her, is unfathomable. “If they fly me back to Colombia,” she tells me in Spanish, “I won’t even leave the airport. I’ll go through customs, immediately turn back, and be on the next flight out.”
2026-01-07 11:55:55
Last week, US forces entered Venezuela, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a nighttime raid. On Monday, they were arraigned in US federal court, pleading not guilty to narcoterrorism charges.
The military action followed a monthslong pressure campaign that included a number of deadly strikes on boats off the Venezuelan coast that the Trump administration alleges were used for drug smuggling. Many legal experts, human rights groups, and lawmakers have called the strikes illegal.
The US has a long history of exerting power and influence in South America—sometimes violating international law in the process. The latest moves by the Trump administration appear to signal a new era of foreign policy for America meant to send a message to countries in the region and around the world.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“I think this was as much about a display of force, whether that was to the Chinese or the Russians, or more likely to regional states,” says Emma Ashford, a Foreign Policy magazine columnist and senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “If the US can do this in Venezuela, the administration has been quite explicit that they can do it elsewhere in the region if they don’t receive cooperation from the Mexicans or the Colombians or others.”
On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson sits down with Ashford to examine the implications of Maduro’s ouster, how she defines what Trump is now calling the “Donroe Doctrine,” and what the US’s latest actions could mean for the region and the world.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: So the New Year brings us stories to talk about, namely Nicolás Maduro being removed from power by the Trump administration. When the news first came out, what went through your mind?
Emma Ashford: To be perfectly honest, it was a rough start to the new year. I think like a lot of people, I was incredibly surprised that the Trump administration had taken this step, which was frankly in many ways, unthinkable even a month or so back. The fact that the administration chose to effectively snatch Maduro and change the leadership in Venezuela, ostensibly, it’s a criminal case, but in practice, this is just not something that we do to foreign leaders.
Can you give me a brief summary of what happened this fall that eventually led to the capture of Maduro by US forces?
So there’s been pressure on Maduro and Venezuela going way back into the first Trump administration and before, but mostly, that’s taken the form of sanctions. What we see starting in the last year has been first, an attempt by the administration to actually negotiate with Caracas. So Rick Grenell, the president’s special envoy, went down there to see if they could get concessions from the major regime on drugs or migration, things like that. That didn’t work out. And so then, you see the administration dialing up the pressure quite substantially, starting with an indictment of Nicolás Maduro himself for various kinds of drug trafficking, and then a parallel military buildup where we start to see more and more US military assets, naval and air assets poured into the Caribbean around Venezuela in a very threatening way. And I think the administration clearly hoped that this would pressure Nicolás Maduro to give up power voluntarily, to go off into a comfortable exile somewhere.
That didn’t happen. And so the snatch and grab that we saw this weekend where Maduro was forcibly removed from power is clearly where the administration decided that they would go next.
I’m curious, when we talked last fall, did you think the US removing Maduro by force was even a possibility? Were you shocked when you first saw the news alerts coming into your phone?
I was rather surprised, yes. Donald Trump has had this pattern in his presidency of brinkmanship, of engaging in a lot of very coercive threats. If people don’t do what the US wants, we will add more tariffs or we will bomb your nuclear facilities. And often, he has backed away from those threats. Sometimes, as in the case of Iran, he has followed through. This is one where I thought that he would probably back down, but he appears to have decided that it would simply look too weak after all of these threats, this military buildup, to back down. And he went ahead with the snatch and grab. I do think it’s notable that this was an incredibly aggressive, assertive military operation. Right? I mean, very shocking in that regard, but actually, the political goals that are being sought here are pretty modest. Right? We’ve taken out Maduro. We’re continuing to work with the existing government that was under Maduro, and hopefully, they’ll be more palatable and more pliable now. That’s actually a pretty limited set of political objectives. So very shocking on the one hand, quite modest on the other.
So Trump was kind of laying the groundwork though for this to happen for a little while. We know that he designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, but it seems like he was positioning Maduro to say that this is a bad guy and we need to take action against him.
Yeah. There’s two things we can point to here in the run-up to this. One is that the Trump administration and the first Trump administration have both had this really conflictual relationship with Venezuela. Right? There was an attempted coup in some ways backed by the US during the first Trump term. There were a lot of sanctions. The US recognized Juan Guaido as the president of Venezuela at one point. So this has been on the radar for a long time. And then we also have this pattern, particularly in the second Trump administration. So this time around, engaging in this kind of brinkmanship with other states, whether it’s trade with China or whether it’s threatening Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. And so we see this military buildup in the Caribbean over the last few months saying, “Nicolás Maduro, you must go, you must give up power voluntarily.”
And what’s different, I think, in this case, or what was surprising was that when Maduro refused to go, Trump actually crossed the line. He didn’t back down. He said, “Right, okay, Maduro’s going,” and that’s what we saw.
Yeah. Trump has repurposed the 1823 Monroe doctrine. He is now calling it the Donroe doctrine. What’s the purpose of the Monroe doctrine and how would you describe the Donroe doctrine?
The Monroe doctrine dates back to the earliest days of the US, and it actually was something a little different than what the Trump administration is saying. So it was basically, this statement that European countries shouldn’t colonize in the Americas anymore, but that the US would help to ensure that Latin America remained friendly and open to commercial trade and all of these things. So it was an assertion of American interests in the hemisphere, but it wasn’t nearly this belligerent. We do have something called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, where we start to see the US say, “Well, we can go out and act in a more imperial fashion in the hemisphere. We will conquer places, overthrow regimes.” And when you read this national security strategy from the Trump administration, the Trump Corollary is what they call this, it does seem to be closer to that, the idea that America has free-reign in the Western hemisphere to use economic force, military force, whatever we want to impose our will.
How has the rest of the world reacted to the United States taking Maduro out of power?
There have been a mixture of reactions. In many ways, we’ve actually seen stronger reactions in Latin America, whether it’s from Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico or from Gustavo Petro in Columbia, who’ve been pretty openly critical of this choice. In Europe, where we might actually expect leaders to be more critical because this violates international law or because they want to see the US not engage in military interventions, leaders have actually been quite muted in their criticisms of this choice. And I think that reflects a lot of the broader politics of Trump’s foreign policy, rather than necessarily this specific incident.
Yeah. I’m wondering if there’s a lot of holding back because fear of what Trump is saying about Greenland.
Yeah. And it’s interesting to see again, in Latin America, Mexico, which the Trump administration has now explicitly threatened as saying, “Well, you could be next after Maduro.” They’ve come out quite strongly and said, “You can’t do this. This is not a place where America gets to call all the shots.” But in Europe, as you say, the Trump administration has also threatened Greenland and other Europeans, have actually been a lot more friendly towards this move. They’ve said, “Oh, well, Maduro needed to go anyway.” And they seem to be much more trying to appease Trump, than they do trying to oppose him.
Yeah. And just to be clear, Maduro was not necessarily a good leader for this country.
Maduro was a terrible leader for Venezuela, as was Hugo Chavez before him. They took a country that for all its flaws, had a relatively healthy economy, a functioning major oil export industry. And over time, Chavez was popularly elected initially, but they basically stripped the state of all its functioning economic institutions, took power. And the last several elections in Venezuela, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t even legitimately conducted and that Maduro and Chavez effectively stole elections. So this has been very bad for the Venezuelan people. There’s been a wave of migration, living standards cratered. Again, none of this is to say that he was a good leader, is a good leader, but the idea of removing him in the night using special forces, that’s quite an escalation.
Have we been able to hear from the Venezuelan people about how they feel about this?
We actually have, not certainly about this raid itself, but we do know that the Venezuelan people had turned pretty decisively against the Maduro regime. Right? Again, the elections that were held, even pretty unfair elections that were held a few years ago showed that the pro-democracy opposition in Venezuela got a very large majority of voters. There’s a lot of Venezuelan migrants in the United States. Many of them came here because they could not earn a living, support their families in Venezuela. I’m sure many would like to go home, see their family in Venezuela in a better place. So we know that the Venezuelan people want a future that is not what Maduro is offering them. I think again, as we saw with Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the question is whether there is a path from this sort of snatch and grab, to a more stable or even potentially Democratic Venezuela, that remains very unclear.
Yeah. It doesn’t seem like the Trump administration has given any kind of roadmap to how they want to do this. At one point, President Trump said that we were going to take over Venezuela. Then he took that back a little bit. Whatever the path forward is, I think the Trump administration wants to see Venezuela and the leaderships kind of kiss the ring, so to speak.
Yeah. Look, I think there’s been a lot of theorizing about why this happened, that it was about seizing the oil, which President Trump keeps saying that it was about migration, et cetera, drugs. But genuinely, I think this was as much about a display of force, whether that was to the Chinese or the Russians or more likely to regional states. Right? If the US can do this in Venezuela, the administration has been quite explicit that they can do it elsewhere in the region if they don’t receive cooperation from the Mexicans, the Colombians or others on some of these issues that they care about. So I see this as much about trying to send a message. They even tweeted yesterday from the State Department’s official account, a picture of the president. It said underneath it, “This is our hemisphere.” Messaging is not usually quite that explicit.
Yeah. How important are Venezuela’s ties to countries like Russia, China, and Iran? Did that impact the decision to remove Maduro?
There’s been this tendency in Washington in recent years to talk about an axis of authoritarians, or CRINK is another acronym you’ll hear. But right, so the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the North Koreans, the idea that these are all tied up in some kind of web of countries that all cooperate together as an alliance. And I think what we saw this weekend, just like we saw in the Iran strikes back in June, is the limits of this notion. Right? The Chinese and the Russians are happy to sell Venezuela, weapons. The Chinese even had a delegation on the ground in Caracas to talk about trade when this snatch and grab happened. But the Chinese, the Russians, they’re not going to step in and fight on behalf of Venezuela. Right? This is something less than a fool alliance. And I think, again, it helps us to understand that while there are strong connections here, this isn’t some global alliance fighting the United States.
When you think about Central America and South America, that a lot of the movements that the United States have done over the years have also been a factor in migration coming to America, which the MAGA way of thinking is immigration from those countries is frowned upon. So it’s almost like the moves that we are making right now could, if history is any indication, could show up at our door five to 10 years from now and cycle a whole new issue of illegal immigration to the United States.
Well, to give one example, Venezuela’s neighbor, Columbia, the US has been heavily involved in Colombia as part of the war and drugs since well back into the Cold War, fighting against insurgencies that were left leaning, but also drug trafficking and all kinds of things. And that did not cause stability in Columbia. Right? That was a long-running, decades long conflict that did at least cause some migration and certainly, instability. What we can say about this current operation in Venezuela is that it is in many ways, a gamble. Right? But if this intervention ends up undermining the government’s ability to control the country if you end up with chaos or internal insurgency, then you’re probably going to get more migration. So this is a significant gamble if you care about that migration question.
I wanted to move the conversation into oil because that seems to be a really big thing that the Trump administration is thinking about. In your first book, Oil, the State, and War, Foreign Policies of Petrostates, it really talks about all of these issues. So how much of this is really about the control of an oil rich nation?
Look, I think President Trump has always had this fixation on oil. If you go back all the way to the 2015 presidential primary, you can see him talking about Iraq and how he should have taken the oil, and that was one of our big mistakes. And so I think for him, this is something he focuses in on. But as a practical matter, it is simply not the case that the US is going to control Venezuelan oil production, extract a bunch of it. It’s not even necessarily the case that companies like Exxon or Chevron are going to want to invest much more in Venezuela. Chevron is already there, was already exporting under a license, and both of those companies have had a lot of their assets expropriated over the last couple of decades by the Venezuelan government. They’ve seen a lot of destruction of the money and the capital that they’ve put into the country.
So again, I think I understand why the Trump administration is talking about the importance of sort of getting the Venezuelan oil industry back on its feet and how that’ll be economically good for everybody. I don’t see a practical plan to get there.
My understanding of the oil market right now is that oil is pretty cheap right now. And adding more Venezuelan oil would only drive the price down because there’d be more supply. So if there’s more supply and you’re driving the price down, I don’t think it’s actually something that oil companies would want.
It’s certainly not something the people of Texas would want or the Dakotas. Look, again, Venezuela used to be one of the world’s largest oil producers. They were significant and it was mostly America that bought that oil. We were importing most of it and refining it on the Gulf Coast. But as Venezuelan production declined because of mismanagement, we found other substitutes. And one of the biggest substitutes that we found was our own production of oil. America has in the last two decades, gone from being a net importer of oil, to being the world’s largest producer of oil and often, exporting as well. And then more broadly, we’re in this situation globally where there is almost too much oil on the market. So there is this kind of strange situation where we were able to go ahead with this operation without spooking markets. Because there’s so much oil, there was no real concern about that, but the oil itself is not nearly as valuable as it would’ve been two decades ago because of that.
So I think, again, Trump has this intuitive understanding of oil is good and we should have more, but that’s not where the market realities are.
What’s special about Venezuela’s oil? Because my understanding about their oil reserves is that it’s a type of oil that takes a lot of refinement. Therefore, you need to build a lot of infrastructure in order to do it. And currently, Venezuela doesn’t really have that.
That’s true. So Venezuela, mostly they do have some of the world’s largest oil reserves, but it is this kind of oil, crude oil that is heavy and sour in the language of the way oil producers talk about this, which means it requires a lot of refining. And like I said, it used to be the United States that did most of that refining. So the refineries were not in Venezuela. It would be shipped across the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and then refined in Texas and elsewhere for use in the United States. Many of the refineries that used to do that have shifted to other supply sources, have retooled themselves in the intervening years. So that would require significant changes in parts of the US. If we were to see a significant uptick in Venezuelan oil again, and the notion that we might then start to build refining capabilities in Venezuela that these companies would be interested in doing that, I think is even more farfetched. Right?
So that requires just a lot more capital poured into a country where these companies have already lost so much money. That seems like, again, a pretty poor business decision.
Is that what Trump means when he says that Venezuela stole US oil industry in the country, that they built infrastructure that didn’t work out? Is that what he’s talking about?
Yeah, that’s actually true. The Venezuelan government under Chavez expropriated the assets of US oil companies. And this is something that has happened again, in oil-rich countries around the world over the last, however, many decades. But in Venezuela, what we see is that the government took over many of these assets, kicked out Exxon, mostly Chevron, gave these assets to the state oil company, petroleum, the Venezuela PDVSA. And then basically through political mismanagement, these facilities started to produce less and less and became less and less capable of actually exporting. So if you think about it from the point of view of one of these US companies, they put in this money, they lost a lot in the expropriation. Now, they’re being asked to go back in, put in more money to rebuild these assets. Again, that’s sort of a very bad bet, I think, particularly in this market where oil is so flush at the moment.
Yeah. I’m curious because I’ve done some reading and it points to strong ties between Venezuela and Cuba, which brings Marco Rubio to mind. I am from Florida. I’m actually talking to you from Florida right now. So I’ve been watching Marco Rubio his whole career. And Marco Rubio is very much, I think what he would say is about Cuban liberation from the communist regime. And I am curious if all of this is connected to that.
So there’s very much a theory that’s circulating within parts of the Republican right, the more hawkish parts at the moment that suggests that Venezuela is the first domino on the way to Havana and elsewhere. And there is some basis to this. As you say, the Cubans have relied for a number of years now on things like Venezuelan shipments of oil to keep their economy afloat. The Cubans lost a lot of their external support back when the Soviet Union collapsed. And since then, they’ve pretty much been relying on some regional countries to prop them up.
And Hugo Chavez was a huge patron of the regime in Havana. However, I think it’s really problematic to suggest that cutting that off is going to cause some kind of collapse in Cuba. And this is why I think a lot of the sort of folks, like Lindsey Graham and others that you see talking about Cuba next, would suggest that some kind of US military action is probably going to be needed as well if that’s what they want to do. This isn’t just a simple matter of cutting off Venezuelan supplies and standing back and letting things happen in Cuba.
Yeah. And Cuba is not the only country that they’ve been talking about. I’ve heard talk about Columbia, and then Greenland as well. How likely do you think it is that we will go after these other countries?
It’s difficult to tell with the Trump administration because they engage in so many threats that it’s often difficult to tell where they’re really serious. And I think one of the reasons why we’ve seen European states in particular, panic over the weekend about Greenland, is that there was genuinely an assumption until Saturday morning that Trump wasn’t serious about Greenland, that he would never actually engage in any kind of action in order to seize Greenland. Now, I still think that’s pretty unlikely that the US would engage in some kind of military action, but it’s very clear that the Trump administration hopes to turn these European fears into concessions, whether that’s allowing the US significantly more basing access in Greenland, whether it is making sure that Greenland can become independent so that it can be tied to the US through a military alliance of some kind.
I do think there is a genuine hope in the Trump administration that they can coerce the Danes to give up Greenland by these actions in Venezuela. So we see it in Latin America, but Greenland is the one where it starts to impact Europe as well.
And if we try to take Greenland by force, that effectively breaks NATO.
I think that probably would. Now, I don’t think that if some deal were reached to buy Greenland or to allow Greenland to have an independence referendum, I think those options would not necessarily break the NATO alliance. US troops landing in Nunavut and Greenland probably would, but it is astounding to me the extent to which we have seen European leaders continue to try and appease the Trump administration. Rather than getting very serious about their own defense, rather than building up their own capabilities, they continue to try and keep US troops on the continent. They continue to try and sustain NATO. And so thus far, we haven’t actually seen them push back or get out of any sort of alliance with the United States. They seemed pretty happy to sort of just give up as much as they have to, to keep the US involved.
So on Monday, Venezuela vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, became the interim president. What’s next for Venezuela? Will she be a better president? Will she cooperate with Trump? How do you think that’s going to work out?
Look, I think it’s a very clear choice by the Trump administration to just remove the man at the top, and then hope that the rest of the apparatus of the Venezuelan party and state fall into line. Right? So in many ways, this is less a regime change and more a demonstration of the things that the US can do if Venezuelan leaders don’t fall in line. In that, at least thus far, it’s been a few days, they seem to be being somewhat successful. Right? Rodriguez gave a few speeches talking about how Maduro is the rightful president of Venezuela, but then immediately issued some statements saying they look forward to working with the United States, that she looks forward to working with US companies and the Trump administration and all of these things.
So I think she’s signaling pretty strongly that she is willing to work with the US. The question is going to be whether she can do what the Trump administration wants to do without making domestic political enemies. Right? Can she keep the Venezuelan military happy while simultaneously pleasing the Trump administration? Can she give up, say, drug kingpins to the United States without losing her domestic support? That is a very fine balancing act that Rodriguez is going to have to walk, and I’m not sure whether she’s going to be able to do it.
So what about Maria Corina Machado, is she coming back to Venezuela? Is she calling for new elections?
This is one of those areas where I think, a lot of more traditional Republican neoconservatives were extremely happy to see Maduro removed from power. They assumed, particularly with Rubio’s involvement in the administration, that the next step would be to attempt to install Machado at the top of the Venezuelan state. She and her allies do have some legitimate claim to have won the last election, but Trump came out very quickly and said, “No, we’re more interested in stability. She doesn’t have the support. She doesn’t have the capabilities to do so.” There’s been reporting that the CIA did a set of analyses that basically showed that she would struggle to consolidate support in Venezuela. And so I think she’s still out there. There is this potential for a democratic transition somewhere down the road, but the administration is signaling pretty strongly that mostly, it cares about stability right now and less about democracy.
So about eight million Venezuelans have already fled the country since 2014 due to the humanitarian crisis, gang warfare, violence, inflation, food shortages, all of those things. So what could this additional instability in Venezuela in the next few months mean, not only for the surrounding countries, but also for the US?
Look, I’m glad you mentioned the surrounding countries because there’s a lot of focus on migration and what it has meant for America, but actually, the majority of the Venezuelans that have left the country are located in Columbia, Brazil, and other surrounding countries. And they have often struggled in those places to integrate into society, to find economically viable work and all of these things. Mostly, Venezuelan migrants are either fleeing repression or they’re looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s entirely understandable, given how bad the Venezuelan economy has been. You mentioned food shortages. It has been difficult to buy food in places in Venezuela, but the country has not descended into absolute chaos or civil conflict. And that I would say is probably the biggest concern, because if we start to see the central government, the instruments of state power lose control over that stability, then you could see a significantly larger wave of refugees fleeing the country, trying to get away from the instability. So that would be, I think, the most significant fear, rather than further economic degradation.
2026-01-07 06:38:08
It’s tough sometimes, when you’re a modestly sized, nonprofit newsroom, to look at the big dogs in journalism—the New York Times or CNN, with their thousands of journalists, or storied magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic—and not feel hopelessly outgunned. They can swarm dozens of journalists on a single story, or pay some $12,000 to duplicate a certain New York mayor’s luxe travel experience. They have fleets of publicists to make sure every success is amplified. Our staff has been known to couchsurf to get a story, air-gap computers with the help of epoxy glue, or enlist a relative to play the guitar for music on our sister radio show, Reveal.
Our newsroom is powered by the conviction of people who believe that journalism needs to exist.
Nevertheless, or maybe because of this, we’ve often punched above our weight when the time comes to hand out awards for the best work across our industry. But this past year? This past year we’re killing it. In recent months we’ve won National Magazine Awards, Webbys, Polks, and duPonts; we’re a finalist for a Pulitzer and several Emmys—basically if there’s an honor to bestow on journalism, it has been bestowed upon us.
Each of those honors has a unique origin story, but they all have one thing in common: They are the result of the merger last year between Mother Jones and Reveal, a union that gave us the ability to dig deeper, tell stories more powerfully, and reach broader audiences.
At a dark time like this, it’s especially important to find reason for joy and celebration. And so we wanted to share details of some of those honors with you—because, in a very real way, they belong to you. The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, doesn’t have a corporate parent or billionaire sponsor. Our combined newsroom is powered by the conviction of many, many people who believe that journalism needs to exist, and who choose to support us with donations and subscriptions. So let’s look at some of the trophies we all earned together.
In May, we were selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer in Explanatory Reporting for “40 Acres and a Lie,” a years-in-the-making project in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity. Reporters dug into a story that many Americans grew up hearing—that enslaved people were promised “40 acres and a mule” after the Civil War, something that never came to pass. We reported on a truth that was even more shocking: Many Black families were in fact given titles to land—across swaths of Georgia and the Carolinas—only to have it cruelly taken away and returned to their enslavers. The reporting team built an AI program to probe the handwritten records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency charged with ensuring formerly enslaved people’s transition to freedom, to tell this story. Those records are a treasure trove of ancestral information for countless Americans, and this project has made them easily accessible and searchable for all.
This reporting also resulted in a three-part radio/podcast series, six in-depth features and essays, that AI database, a video, and a beautiful edition of this magazine. You can find them all right here.
The project also won a National Magazine Award “Ellie”—the Oscar of the magazine world. And it’s part of the reason that Mother Jones was chosen for General Excellence—think “Best Picture”—for coverage that also included our profile of a mass shooter’s mother and a full issue on American oligarchy, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Donald Trump cavorting on the cover much as they would at the inauguration a year later. (That cover was also a finalist for the “Cover of the Year” award.)
The merger also allowed us to bring sassy but truthful reporting to video platforms where so many Americans—especially younger people—get their news. The Webby Awards named our video correspondent, Garrison Hayes, Best Creator—of them all!—on social media. And our feature film The Grab, which investigates the global power struggle over who controls our water, has been nominated for four Emmys.
Another of our projects, this one in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, and focusing on how police pump families of people they have killed for information before they deliver the tragic news, received both a duPont and a Polk award, another of the highest honors in journalism.
Those are just the heaviest statuettes and paperweights we’ve collected of late. It’s a big haul, and amazing recognition for the hardest-working team, and the best community of support, in all of journalism. So here’s hoping that you’ll raise a glass to yourself. We’re so proud and honored to be part of this with you.
