Venezuela’s government deported Alex Saab, a onetime trusted ally of former President Nicolás Maduro, to the United States on Saturday, according to a short statement from the country’s immigration authority. The authority did not name Saab’s destination explicitly but said the decision was based on “several ongoing criminal investigations in the U.S.” The move came less than three years after President Joe Biden pardoned Saab as part of a high-profile prisoner exchange — and it places Saab in U.S. custody at a time when Maduro himself awaits trial on federal drug charges in Manhattan.
The reversal is stark. Maduro fought through diplomatic and legal channels for years to bring Saab home after his first international arrest in 2020. At the time, then-Vice President Delcy Rodríguez — now Venezuela’s acting president — called Saab an “innocent Venezuelan diplomat” who had been “kidnapped” while on a humanitarian mission to Iran to circumvent the “immoral, imperial blockade” imposed by the United States. Venezuela’s government even submitted what it claimed was Saab’s Venezuelan passport to a U.S. court. Saturday’s statement, by contrast, referred to Saab only as a “Colombian citizen,” an apparent nod to Venezuelan law that prohibits the extradition of nationals.
Saab, 54, amassed a fortune through Venezuelan government contracts. But his standing collapsed after Maduro’s ouster in January. Rodríguez removed him from her Cabinet and stripped him of his role as the main conduit for foreign companies hoping to invest in Venezuela. Reports have circulated for months that he was imprisoned or under house arrest inside the country.
His deportation exposes fissures inside Rodríguez’s fragile ruling coalition of Chavistas — the movement founded by the late Hugo Chávez. Rodríguez has generated goodwill in Washington by bending to Trump administration demands to open Venezuela’s oil and mining sectors to American investment. Yet those concessions infuriate more radical allies like Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who wields influence inside the security forces and faces U.S. criminal charges himself. Handing Saab over to the United States is likely to deepen those internal tensions.
The U.S. investigations into Saab center on alleged corruption in a food program meant for Venezuela’s poorest. The Associated Press reported in February that federal prosecutors have been examining Saab’s role in a bribery conspiracy tied to government food-import contracts. The probe stems from a 2021 case the Justice Department brought against Saab’s longtime partner, Alvaro Pulido, a former law enforcement official told the AP. That prosecution, in Miami, revolves around the CLAP program — a system Maduro created to distribute staples such as rice, corn flour, and cooking oil during a period of rampant hyperinflation.
Saab is identified in the indictment as “Co-Conspirator 1” and is alleged to have helped set up a web of companies used to bribe a pro-Maduro governor, securing contracts for food boxes imported from Mexico at inflated prices. The scheme, prosecutors say, profited from a program intended to feed hungry Venezuelans.
Saab was first arrested in 2020 when his private jet stopped for refueling in Cape Verde en route to Iran. The Venezuelan government described the trip as a humanitarian mission to circumvent U.S. sanctions. Despite objections from law enforcement and Republican senators — Iowa’s Chuck Grassley wrote that history “should remember (Saab) as a predator of vulnerable people” — Biden agreed in 2023 to free Saab in exchange for several imprisoned Americans and the return of a fugitive defense contractor known as “Fat Leonard.” Biden’s pardon was narrowly tailored to a 2019 indictment related to housing contracts that allegedly involved bribes for low-income units that were never built.
Now back in U.S. custody, Saab could become a valuable witness against Maduro. Before his first arrest, the businessman secretly met with the Drug Enforcement Administration. In a closed-door court hearing in 2022, his lawyers disclosed that Saab had for years helped the DEA untangle corruption in Maduro’s inner circle, forfeiting more than $12 million in illegal proceeds as part of that cooperation. Saab’s Miami-based attorney, Neil Schuster, declined to comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.