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The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Jorge Rodríguez, Venezuela’s National Assembly president and the brother of interim President Delcy Rodríguez, as Washington deepens ties with the government that replaced Nicolás Maduro.

Getting into it: The Treasury Department removed Rodríguez from its sanctions blacklist on Wednesday, unfreezing any assets he holds under US jurisdiction and allowing Americans to do business with him, though it gave no reason for the move. Rodríguez, a 60-year-old psychiatrist who served as vice president under Hugo Chávez and has led the legislature since 2021, was sanctioned in 2018 along with his sister, Maduro’s wife Cilia Flores and other members of Maduro’s inner circle. At the time, the State Department said Maduro gave the siblings top posts “to help him maintain power and solidify his authoritarian rule.”

Since the US captured Maduro in January, Rodríguez has used the legislature to open Venezuela’s oil and mining sectors to more foreign companies, and he leads the government’s negotiating team in US-backed talks with the opposition. The US lifted sanctions on Delcy Rodríguez in April, and Caracas has since agreed to give the US access to 17 oil fields, and in August Trump said he wants the US to take a big cut of Venezuelan crude to restock the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Many Venezuelans, especially Maduro opponents, say the Rodríguez siblings are just Maduro’s government with new faces at the top. Delcy Rodríguez told the UN General Assembly last month that elections are coming but hasn’t picked a date, and María Corina Machado (the opposition leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize) wants a vote no later than July 2027.

This all comes as Maduro and Flores wait in a New York jail to stand trial on drug trafficking charges, with prosecutors adding new counts last week that accuse them of torturing prisoners, Americans among them.