On January 3rd, the United States launched a military strike on Venezuela and captured sitting Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The strikes inside Venezuela come after a U.S. pressure campaign against the Maduro government, which the Trump administration accused of flooding the US with drugs and gang members. 

Senator Chuck Grassley shared his thoughts on the military action taken without congressional approval, “There’s plenty of precedent for presidents taking action as this President Trump did. My feeling is this, there’s partisan disagreement on whether or not this should have been done. But there is bipartisan agreement that Maduro was a bad egg, and nobody is losing any sleep because he is not president of that country. I think that we ought to be very proud of our military doing this, a very precise operation. That if anything had gone wrong, it could have led to the death of a lot of military people.”   

When asked what he believed the benefits will be of this move for the United States, Grassley stated, “Hopefully it does cut down on the number of drugs coming into the United States because about 70,000 people lose their lives because of drug overdose every year. So protecting American people is the number one responsibility of the President of the United States and the federal government, and that’s how the president is protecting the people of this country, by keeping drugs out.” 

Government officials have indicated that military operations against drug cartels in Latin America would continue, and as of December 31st, at least 115 people had been killed in at least 35 strikes on 36 vessels according to US military officials.