Many U.S. Venezuelans praise Maduro capture, but some protest in Los Angeles

WASHINGTON— Maria Eugenia Torres Ramirez was having dinner with her family in Los Angeles on Friday night when the flood of messages began. News had begun to circulate that the USA was invading Venezuela and was going to capture its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Torres Ramirez, 38, fled his hometown in 2021, settling in Los Angeles and his asylum application is pending. His family is scattered all over the world: Colombia, Chile and France. Since his parents died, none of his loved ones have remained in Venezuela.

Still, the news that the autocrat who had separated them had been captured created a long-awaited sense of elation, bringing the intercontinental brothers and cousins ​​together for a rare four-hour phone call as the night wore on.

“I’ve waited so long for this moment from inside Venezuela that now I’m outside, it’s like I’m watching a movie,” said Torres Ramirez, a former political activist who opposes Maduro. “It’s like a jolt of relief.”

Many Venezuelans across the United States celebrated the military action that resulted in Maduro’s arrest. Economic collapse and political repression led to about 8 million Venezuelans have been migrating since 2014, making it one of the world’s largest displacement crises.

As of 2023, approximately 770,000 people live in the United States, mostly concentrated in the Miami, Orlando, Houston, and New York areas. Just over 9,500 live in Los Angeles, according to a 2024 U.S. Census estimate.

Residents of Doral, a South Florida city that is home to the largest Venezuelan American community took to the streets On Saturday morning, they held the Venezuelan flag, sang together and praised the military action as an act of freedom.

A different picture emerged as groups opposing Maduro’s arrest took to the streets in Los Angeles, but none identified themselves as of Venezuelan origin. At a rally attended by about 40 people south of downtown Los Angeles, John Parker, a representative of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, called the raid a “brutal assault and kidnapping” that amounted to a war crime.

He said US intervention in Venezuela has nothing to do with stopping the flow of drugs, but everything to do with undermining a legitimate socialist government. As Parker called for Maduro’s release, several dozen protesters behind him chanted “Hands off Venezuela.”

Parker said he saw “people’s love for Maduro” when he visited Venezuela a few weeks ago as part of a U.S. peacemaking mission.

A demonstration in Pershing Square later drew hundreds of people in the rain to protest US intervention. However, when a speaker chanted “No war in Venezuela”, a woman draped in a Venezuelan flag tried to approach him and speak into the microphone. A group of demonstrators surrounded him and dragged him away.

At Mi Venezuela restaurant in Vernon, 16-year-old Paola Moleiro and her family ordered empanadas Saturday morning.

Part of one of the restaurant’s walls was covered with Venezuelan banknotes scrawled with messages. One read: “3 de enero del 2026. Venezuela is free.”

Venezuela is free.

Around midnight the night before, Paola started receiving messages on WhatsApp from relatives in Venezuela. They said the power was out and sent videos of sounds resembling bomb explosions.

Paola was very scared. In 2023, he left Venezuela with his parents and siblings when he was 7 years old and went first to Panama and then to the USA. But the rest of his family remained in Venezuela and had no idea what was going on.

Paola and her family continued scanning the television channels to get an idea of ​​what was going on. At around 01:30, President Trump announced that US forces had captured Maduro.

“The first thing I did was I called my aunt and said, ‘We’ll see each other again,'” he said.

Due to the Venezuelan state’s control over the media, their relatives were unaware that their leader had been captured by US forces. “Are you telling me the truth?” Paola said her aunt asked.

Paola hasn’t been home for nine years. She misses her grandmother and her grandmother’s cooking, especially her caraotas negras, or black beans. He said some foods were so scarce in his childhood that he ate apples for the first time after moving to Panama.

Paola said she was grateful to Trump for ending decades of authoritarian rule that had turned her country into a shell of what it once was.

“Venezuela has always prayed for this,” he said. “It’s been 30 years. I feel like everything was in God’s hands last night.”

It was difficult for Torres Ramirez to reconcile her appreciation for Trump’s success in Venezuela with the fear she felt as an immigrant during Trump’s presidency.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” he said. “I felt like I was being persecuted all year long. I had to face ICE. I had to go to my appointment out of fear that I might lose everything because immigration policies had changed and there was complete uncertainty. For a moment, I felt like I was in Venezuela. I felt like I was being persecuted right here.”

At a press conference Saturday morning, Trump said Maduro was responsible for smuggling illegal drugs into the United States and the deaths of thousands of Americans. He repeated the baseless claim that Maduro’s government has emptied Venezuela’s prisons and mental hospitals and “sent its worst and most violent monsters to the United States to steal American lives.”

“They sent everyone to the United States in a bad way, but they don’t anymore, and now we have a border that no one can cross,” he said.

Trump also announced that the United States would “manage” Venezuela and its vast oil reserves.

“We will conduct it professionally,” he said. “We will have the biggest oil companies in the world invest billions and billions of dollars and take that money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary of that will be the Venezuelan people.”

Torres Ramirez said he was glad Maduro was ousted but wasn’t sure how he would feel about Trump saying the U.S. would take over Venezuela’s oil industry. He said it may not be positive for the Venezuelan economy in the long run, but US intervention is a win for the country’s political future if it means people can return to their homes.

Patricia Andrade, 63, who runs Raíces Venezolanas, a volunteer program in Miami that distributes donations to Venezuelan immigrants, said she believes the Trump administration made the right move by staying involved until the transition of power occurred.

Andrade, a longtime U.S. citizen, said he hasn’t been to Venezuela in 25 years, even missing the deaths of both parents. He said he was accused of treason for condemning the imprisonment of political opponents and the breakdown of Venezuelan democracy under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. He said he was concerned that political prisoners remaining in Venezuela could be killed as revenge for Maduro’s arrest.

“We tried everything: elections, marches, new elections… but it couldn’t be held,” he said. “Maduro was getting worse and worse, the pressure was getting more and more intense. If they hadn’t removed him, we would never have saved Venezuela.”

Although he did not want the US to solve other countries’ problems, he thanked Trump for the US intervention in Venezuela.

He said he can’t wait to visit family members who are staying there.