US plans to seize Venezuelan president's plane held in Dominican Republic during Rubio visit

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — (AP) — The Trump administration plans to seize 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 intends to announce the seizure on Thursday during a visit to Santo Domingo, the last stop of his five-nation tour of Latin America, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter and a State Department document obtained by The Associated Press.

Carrying out the seizure required that Rubio sign off on a foreign aid freeze waiver request to pay more than $230,000 in storage and maintenance fees. It also required approval by the U.S. Department of Justice.

That waiver request, submitted early last week, has been approved and Rubio is expected to make the announcement at what the State Department has described publicly as only a “law enforcement engagement.”

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 Washngton says are violations of U.S. sanctions, according to the document.

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, the U.S. State Department said late Wednesday on X that the Panamanians had agreed to allow U.S. warships to transit the Panama Canal without charge.

But 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 department had no immediate comment Thursday.

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.

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Associated Press writer Alma Solís in Panama City contributed to this report.