U.S. Coast Guard seizes Panama-flagged oil tanker Centuries off Venezuela as Trump's oil 'blockade' escalates

In a pre-dawn operation on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025, the U.S. Coast Guard seized a Panama-flagged oil tanker named Centuries in international waters off Venezuela. It was the second sanctioned tanker the United States had taken within roughly ten days, following the earlier interdiction of a tanker called The Skipper just after it left a Venezuelan port. CBS News reported that the seizure followed "a similar playbook" to that earlier operation, and that the same weekend the Coast Guard attempted to forcibly board a third vessel, the Bella 1, under a Justice Department seizure warrant, only for that ship to refuse boarding and flee across the Atlantic while sending distress signals.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly described Centuries as "a falsely flagged vessel operating as part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet to traffic stolen oil and fund the narcoterrorist Maduro regime." The Venezuelan government condemned the seizure as "a serious act of piracy," called it part of a "colonialist model" it vowed would "fail," and said it would pursue "all corresponding actions, including the complaint to the United Nations Security Council." The seizures came days after President Trump publicly called for a "total and complete blockade" of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, the latest escalation in a sustained pressure campaign against President Nicolas Maduro that has also included a series of lethal U.S. strikes on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

The Standing records this as an instance of executive overreach and the bypassing of Congress. A naval blockade of a foreign nation's shipping is traditionally treated as an act of war, a power the Constitution reserves to Congress, and the commerce being restricted is foreign commerce that Congress is empowered to regulate. The administration grounds each individual seizure in a Justice Department civil-forfeiture warrant under sanctions law, so the specific interdictions are not themselves extrajudicial, but the president declared and is enforcing a blanket maritime blockade of another country without congressional authorization. The Standing records the act of declaring and enforcing that blockade through the seizure of commercial vessels, leaving to others the question of how courts will ultimately judge it.