Military officials announced on 15th January that the US military has taken another oil tanker at sea to enforce its sanctions against Venezuela, as the sanctions were announced by Donald Trump.

Marine records indicate that the crude oil tanker, which is sailing under a Guyanese flag, is named Veronica. The US Southern Command announced in a post on social media that it was boarded in a pre-dawn operation by the US Marines and sailors.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem verified the operation in a further post, “complimenting the meritorious Coast Guard men and women who once again secured an impeccably performed operation, as per international law.”

She reported the ship belonged to a so-called ghost fleet of foreign-flagged tankers that ran in violation of the so-called quarantine of authorized vessels in the Caribbean issued by the president.

It was announced before Trump was due to meet in the White House on Thursday with the Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado, to talk about the US seizure of the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas earlier this month and the future of Venezuela.

“This operation was carried out together with the US Coast Guard, the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department,” the Southern Command post said. It released low-resolution black and white aerial video that seemed to depict service personnel falling on the deck of the tanker out of a helicopter.

Forces deployed out of USS Gerald R Ford (CVN 78) and seized Motor/Tanker Veronica, incidentally. The message said that the “latest tanker, the Veronica, is on the hunt in defiance of the quarantine of sanctioned vessels by President Trump in the Caribbean, which has shown the effectiveness of Operation Southern Spear once more.”

It failed to specify the location of the operation, but on marinetraffic.com, the last position of the 815ft (249m) ship was reported to be off the coast of Venezuela 12 days ago.

Reuters, with shipping documents of state company PDVSA and tracking the tankertrackers.com, said it left Venezuelan waters empty at the beginning of January, yet it had not been back to Venezuela since other ships have been in recent days.

The sixth known US military boarding and seizure of a foreign-flagged oil tanker is in support of Trump’s doublespeak against the Venezuelan oil industry since the US seized Maduro and took him to the US earlier this month, an action involving air strikes on Caracas that Venezuelan officials count killed over 100 military personnel and civilians.

On Friday, the Southern Command announced that it was boarding a ship called Olina in the Caribbean Sea off Trinidad, the fifth interdiction of a vessel in recent weeks. The plane carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, also launched that assault.

Individually, the string of strikes that have been instituted on suspected drug vessels in the offshore waters of Venezuela since the fall.

Since the Trump administration overthrew Maduro, it has acted to restrict the exportation of Venezuelan oil products to the rest of the world.

On its part, the Department of War is so committed to its mission of crushing the illicit activity in the Western Hemisphere that it posted on Thursday that “the mission has been accomplished.”

The US has alleged that Venezuela is attempting to disguise its operations by using false-flag tankers or that it was using vessels whose registration had already been revoked when they were intercepted. On 7 January, the US forces boarded the Russian-flagged oil tanker Marinera in the Atlantic in the first and so far most significant act of this kind.

That vessel, which had been trailed by a Russian sub, was followed across the Atlantic Ocean in over two weeks. The British defence ministry of Britain affirmed that it had assisted the US troops in carrying out the operation to capture it.

Trump made the announcement last week of a deal with the leaders of an interim government in Venezuela, which he claimed was going to supply up to 50m barrels of crude oil to the US. The other executive order he signed was to protect Venezuelan oil earnings in US-controlled accounts.

Politically, the president has done little to acknowledge Machado, and he has instead acknowledged the former vice-president of Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, as the interim leader of Venezuela, although Trump insists on running the country.

On the day when Maduro was captured, the US president mentioned that Machado was a “nice woman”; however, she was not a good person to run Venezuela because she did not have the “respect” required to do that.

Venezuela ambassador to the UK Félix Plasencia, who is a close friend of Rodríguez, was also planning to be in Washington on Thursday to explore with Trump administration officials details on what comes next in a plan for how the country would shortly be.