A US federal judge has set 1 June 2027 as the trial date for Venezuela's ousted president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who face drug trafficking and related charges in a New York court. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein announced the date during a brief 15-minute hearing on Wednesday, in line with a schedule proposed jointly by prosecutors and defence lawyers. Neither Maduro nor Flores spoke during the proceedings.
Maduro, 63, and Flores, 69, have been held at a Brooklyn jail since early January, when US forces seized them from their Caracas residence in a nighttime raid ordered by President Donald Trump. The Trump administration has described the operation as a "surgical law enforcement operation" in a criminal case first brought six years ago. Maduro has called himself a prisoner of war and characterised the capture as a kidnapping. Both have pleaded not guilty and face potential life sentences if convicted of conspiring to traffic thousands of tonnes of cocaine into the United States by colluding with Venezuelan law enforcement to assist drug kingpins. In total, Maduro faces four serious criminal charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy and conspiracy to import cocaine.
Before the trial begins, the defence is expected to mount significant legal challenges. Maduro's lawyer, Barry Pollack, said in court on Wednesday that he would first seek to have the indictment dismissed on sovereign immunity grounds — arguing that Maduro, as head of a sovereign state, cannot be prosecuted in this way. Pollack has also indicated he intends to contest the legality of the military operation that brought his client to the US. The court has scheduled a hearing for 17 November to consider these pretrial motions, with defence lawyers set to begin filing them in early September.
The case carries deep geopolitical weight. Maduro, a socialist who led Venezuela from 2013 until his capture, has long accused Washington of seeking his removal to gain control over the country's vast oil reserves, among the largest in the world. The US government, which stopped recognising him as Venezuela's legitimate president in 2019, accuses him of being a corrupt ruler whose mismanagement caused an economic collapse and who fraudulently claimed victory in the 2018 and 2024 elections — allegations supported by the Venezuelan opposition and a range of international observers. Since Maduro's detention, Venezuela has been governed by his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, operating in close contact with the US State Department. Washington has since eased some sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry, allowing foreign companies to expand energy projects in the country and permitting the Venezuelan government to pay Maduro's legal defence costs.
Small groups of demonstrators gathered outside the Manhattan courthouse on Wednesday, holding signs in support of the detained couple. The coming months of pretrial litigation — touching on sovereign immunity, the legality of military capture, and the scope of executive power — are expected to raise complex and largely untested questions of US and international law before the case reaches a jury.