OAN Staff James Meyers
4:40 PM – Tuesday, March 4, 2025
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that Chevron has been given 30 days to stop oil production in Venezuela, since Socialist President Nicolas Maduro has not made anymore progress on electoral reforms and migrant returns.
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The most recent announcement reverses a Biden-era license that allowed the oil titan to operate in Venezuela despite U.S. sanctions.
Maduro was sworn in to his third six-year term — despite credible evidence indicating that he lost the election and widespread protests from the country’s citizens.
He was proclaimed the winner of the country’s presidential election by electoral authorities under the tight control of the ruling Socialist Party. However, the opposition party argued that they had tallied the votes themselves and discovered that their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, won the election with 67% against Maduro’s 30%.
The Trump administration has continued to push for fairness and accountability in Venezuela regarding its elections, and it has pushed Maduro to take back Venezuelan illegal aliens who have been living in the U.S. after illegally entering during the Biden administration.
The Treasury Department gave the U.S.-based oil giant, Chevron, an April 3rd deadline to pull up stakes — which is much quicker than the usual six-month dwindling period.
“Closing down Chevron’s operations in a month is an almost impossible task,” Geoff Ramsey, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, told Bloomberg. “I would bet the administration is leaving space for the license to be renewed in April, if new terms are negotiated.”
Chevron later said in a statement that its business in Venezuela complies with all laws and regulations, including the United States’ sanctions imposed during Trump’s previous term.
“We are aware of the President’s directive and will abide by any direction given by the U.S. Treasury Department to implement that directive,” a Chevron spokesperson told the New York Post.
The deadline to Chevron’s oil production in Venezuela could eventually remove up to 200,000 barrels a day from the global market, according to Bloomberg. Additionally, the move will not have an immediate impact on prices after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) increased production, while planning to increase output by 138,000 barrels per day in April.
Republicans in the past have criticized the Biden administration’s waiver, highlighting that Chevron is the backbone of Maduro’s controlled economy.
Additionally, in January, Trump sent White House Special Envoy Richard Grenell to meet with Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. After the trip with Grenell, the White House brought home six of at least 13 Americans wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela.
After diplomatic talks with Trump administration officials, Maduro seemingly realized that he was no longer dealing with a weak American leader, such as former President Biden. Despite initially refusing to take back his citizens, Maduro quickly agreed to send two planes to a Texas military base in order to pick up Venezuelan illegal aliens in the U.S., as well as a third jet to retrieve more of his citizens from Honduras.
However, the flights eventually stopped in late February, as Trump expressed a desire to kill the Biden administration’s waivers.
“We are hereby reversing the concessions that Crooked Joe Biden gave to Nicolás Maduro,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on February 26th.
The 47th GOP president has maintained that Maduro’s party has not met fair electoral conditions, and they have not transported “violent criminals…at the rapid pace that they had agreed to.”
Nearly eight million Venezuelan residents have moved away from the country while Maduro has been in power, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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