Maduro Grows Visibly Thinner, Turns to Scripture in Brooklyn Jail as 2027 Trial Looms
Ten months after U.S. forces hauled him out of Caracas, ousted strongman Nicolás Maduro is reportedly leaning on the Bible behind bars at a notorious Brooklyn jail while bracing for a trial that's still seven months away.
Nicolás Maduro has grown noticeably thinner since U.S. forces captured him, and the ousted Venezuelan leader is now spending much of his time with religious texts while held at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center, according to reporting relayed from the New York Times this week.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized in a U.S. military operation in Caracas on Jan. 3, 2026. Both face a stack of federal charges — including narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy and firearms possession — and have pleaded not guilty. Their trial isn't set to begin until June 1, 2027, meaning Maduro faces more months, if not years, inside the federal system before any verdict.
Accounts of his physical change differ on the cause. Some sources point to the quality of food inside the detention center as the likely driver of the weight loss. Maduro's son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, has instead credited his father's thinner appearance to daily exercise and discipline rather than prison conditions.
WE ARE STANDING FIRM.
That was Maduro's own message in an earlier social media post from detention, thanking supporters. The facility holding him has a grim reputation of its own: lawyers and former inmates have described the Metropolitan Detention Center as hell on earth,
and people briefed on his confinement say he's been cut off from newspapers and the internet, with only limited phone access, according to CTV News.
Outside the jail, Venezuela's political landscape keeps shifting without him. The country's interim government, led by Delcy Rodríguez, has struck an oil agreement with Washington and freed dozens of political prisoners as part of ongoing talks with the opposition — a sign of how far Venezuelan politics has moved on since the man who dominated it for over a decade was dragged out of the presidential palace.
For Maduro, the next marker on the calendar is further out: a trial that won't start for roughly seven more months, leaving him to wait it out in a cell one Brooklyn jail a world away from Caracas.