US seizes Venezuelan president's plane held in Dominican Republic during Rubio visit
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — The Trump administration on Thursday seized a second plane belonging to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro 's government that is currently in the Dominican Republic.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio watched as American officials affixed the seizure warrant to the plane during a visit to Santo Domingo, the last stop of his five-nation tour of Latin America.
Carrying out the seizure required that Rubio sign off on a waiver to a freeze that President Donald Trump imposed on foreign aid to pay more than $230,000 in storage and maintenance fees, according to a State Department document obtained by The Associated Press.
It also required approval by the U.S. Department of Justice, which said the plane was used by a Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company facing sanctions. An investigation showed the company bought the plane in the U.S. in 2017, sent it to Venezuela and it was serviced multiple times using American parts, the department said.
The plane is a Dassault Falcon 200 that has been used by Maduro and top aides, including his vice president and defense minister, to travel the world, including visits to Greece, Turkey, Russia and Cuba, in what Washington says are violations of U.S. sanctions, according to the State Department.
The seizure of the plane comes just a week after President Donald Trump's envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, visited Caracas and met with Maduro to discuss the repatriation of Venezuelan nationals who illegally entered the United States. Grenell returned with six Americans who had been detained in Venezuela.
The U.S. seized another of Maduro's planes from the Dominican Republic in September 2024.
At the time, the U.S. Justice Department said Maduro associates in late 2022 and early 2023 used a Caribbean-based shell company to hide their involvement in the purchase of the plane — a Dassault Falcon 900EX valued at $13 million — from a company in Florida.
Related to Rubio's first stop on his trip, he said Thursday that he was 'not confused' about the status of an agreement about eliminating fees for U.S. warships to transit the Panama Canal and understood that Panama has to follow a legal process to take the step.
'They're a democratically elected government. They have rules. They have laws. They're going to follow their process,' he said.
It comes after the U.S. State Department said late Wednesday on X that the Panamanians had agreed to waive the fees.
Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino later denied that, saying Thursday he had told U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a day earlier that he could neither set the fees to transit the canal nor exempt anyone from them and that he was surprised by the U.S. State Department's statement suggesting otherwise.
The fees had been one focus of President Donald Trump's complaints about the canal, which he has threatened to retake from Panama unless Panama severely limits Chinese influence in the area.
Given that the U.S. has a treaty obligation to protect the canal, Rubio said, 'I find it absurd that we would have to pay fees to transit a zone that we are obligated to protect in a time of conflict.'
___
Associated Press writer Alma Solís in Panama City contributed to this report.
Matthew Lee, The Associated Press
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