Former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who was captured early Saturday during a U.S. military operation, has arrived at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City, where he will soon be booked along with his wife, Cilia.
Maduro was driven to the detention center in Brooklyn at around 9 p.m. Eastern time after being processed at the DEA office in Manhattan. He first touched U.S. soil at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Orange County, New York, where a U.S. plane reportedly carrying him from Guantanamo Bay landed four hours earlier.
Some of those stops provided the first glimpses of Maduro since his capture. After deboarding at the air base, he was seen in dark clothing surrounded by dozens of federal officers. Later at the DEA office, he briefly passed by the media inside, again seen in dark clothing and appearing in good spirits, telling reporters “Good night” and “Happy new year.”
The Metropolitan Detention Center where Maduro will now be booked is far from cheery, however. While known for holding high-profile defendants like Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, and notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, its conditions are grisly.
Judges and lawmakers have previously sounded the alarm about the federal jail, calling it “barbaric” and “inhumane.” It recently caught lawmakers’ attention after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began using it to detain migrants.
Still, Maduro and his wife Cilia, who was also taken into U.S. custody, likely won’t be detained there long, as Maduro is set to stand trial as early as Monday.
Maduro is facing drug and weapons charges under a new indictment from the Department of Justice that mainly alleges he has been complicit in the drug trafficking trade by enabling “violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect, and transport tons of cocaine to the United States.”
The extraordinary move by U.S. officials to take Maduro and his wife into custody was part of a military operation authorized by President Donald Trump, a mission that also included several strikes on Caracas. The operation lasted under an hour and did not lead to any deaths of U.S. service members, though an unspecified number were injured.
WHAT IS THE DELTA FORCE? THE US MILITARY UNIT BEHIND THE VENEZUELA RAID TOPPLING MADURO
This is a developing story.
