Donald Trump has announced that the airspace above and around Venezuela is “closed in its entirety” as concerns over potential military confrontation escalate.
The President took to Truth Social to declare: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Trump’s proclamation follows a warning from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to major airlines about a “potentially hazardous situation” when flying over Venezuela due to a “worsening security situation and heightened military activity in or around” the nation.
Escalating tensions between the two nations have emerged alongside a US military build-up off South America and a series of American military strikes targeting vessels in international waters off Venezuela and Colombia that have resulted in at least 83 deaths.
The US has claimed that the boats it attacked were carrying drugs, reports the Mirror.
Latin American leaders, international law experts and relatives of the victims, along with some US Congress members, have branded the American strikes as extrajudicial killings, asserting that most of those killed were fishermen.
Concerns are now mounting that Trump will utilise the military deployment in the region – which encompasses thousands of US troops, a nuclear submarine and a fleet of warships escorting the USS Gerald R Ford – to launch an assault on Venezuela in an attempt to remove President Nicolas Maduro from power.
The US has levelled accusations of drug trafficking at Maduro, while the Venezuelan president has countered by accusing the US government of “fabricating a new eternal war” against him.
Maduro has claimed that the US is ramping up its “excuses and lies” in an attempt to justify intervention in his country.
Meanwhile, Trump threatened to stop “all migration from third-world countries” and took a swipe at Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar and the state’s Governor Tim Walz in a bizarre late-night rant.
The President called Gov Walz “re*****d” and claimed Rep Omar had “probably entered the country illegally”, launching into an unhinged diatribe about “Somalian gangs roving the streets looking for ‘prey'”.
He also claimed that “most of” the USA’s foreign population “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”.
The tirade came in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington DC that left one dead and the other in critical condition.
Posting on Truth Social, he ranted: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”