U.S. forces seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, two government sources familiar with the matter told The Intercept. President Donald Trump called the boat the “largest one ever seized.”

The capture comes after the U.S. military spent the past three months conducting air strikes in the region that have destroyed at least 22 boats, killing at least 87 civilians.

The U.S. government has not yet explained its justification for capturing the Venezuelan vessel.

The two government sources said the operation was led by the U.S. Coast Guard. “We would refer you to the White House for questions,” Lt. Krystal Wolfe, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told The Intercept in response to questions.

“We don’t have a comment,” said a Pentagon spokeswoman, who also referred questions to the White House.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It appears they’re now aiming to further tighten the economic noose, regardless of its impact on civilians, in pursuit of their regime change goal.”

While the U.S. once bought much of Venezuela’s oil, that trade was halted in 2019 when the first Trump administration imposed sanctions on the country’s state-owned oil company. While shipments to the United States resumed in 2023, most of Venezuela’s oil is now exported to China. The U.S. has also imposed financial sanctions on the Venezuelan government.

“Congress and the international community should consider this as an illegal act of war, in the legal sense as well as for the surge in poverty and violence it could cause,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “The Trump administration’s indiscriminate sanctions have increased hunger across the population but have failed to topple the government. It appears they’re now aiming to further tighten the economic noose, regardless of its impact on civilians, in pursuit of their regime change goal.”

The capture comes as the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean since the summer — the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

As part of a campaign of air strikes on boats, the Trump administration has secretly declared that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with 24 cartels, gangs, and armed groups including Cártel de los Soles, which the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Experts and insiders see this as part of a plan for regime change in Venezuela that stretches back to Trump’s first term. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, denies that he heads a cartel.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Trump has pursued an abrasive and interventionist foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere during his second term. “[W]e will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” reads the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy. It harkens back to President Theodore Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-20th-century “Big Stick” corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

President James Monroe’s 1823 announcement warned the nations of Europe that the United States would not permit the establishment of new colonies in the Americas. Roosevelt’s more muscular decree held that Washington had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries across the Americas. In the first quarter of the 20th century, that Roosevelt corollary would be used to justify U.S. occupations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

What’s been called the “Donroe Doctrine” began to take shape with threats to seize the Panama Canal, acquire Greenland, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Trump administration also claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States, allowing the government to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

More recently, Trump even claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of the gang on the streets of Washington, D.C. during the summer or early fall – an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against the United States and that it is in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

Trump also renewed long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.

Trump recently told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other,” before launching into a confusing ramble that devolved into insults about former President Joe Biden’s IQ, a tirade about Politico, and, in response to a follow-up question about his goals regarding Venezuela, his ownership of the Doral Country Club in Miami, Florida.