Many Venezuelan Americans applauded Maduro’s capture, but others protested 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. The country had started to spread that the United States is attacking Venezuela and will seize its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Torres Ramirez, 38, fled his country in 2021, settled in LA and has a pending asylum claim. His family is spread all over the world – Colombia, Chile and France. Since his parents died, none of his loved ones are left in Venezuela.

Still, the news that the tyrant who separated them had been taken brought long-awaited joy and brought siblings and cousins ​​across continents together in a rare four-hour phone call as the night wore on.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time inside Venezuela, and now that I’m out, it’s like watching a movie,” said Torres Ramirez, a former political activist who opposed Maduro. “It’s like being free.”

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

About 770,000 live in the US as of 2023, concentrated in the Miami, Orlando, Houston and New York counties. Just over 9,500 live in LA, according to the 2024 US Census estimate.

In the South Florida city of Doral, home to the largest Venezuelan American community, residents poured into the streets Saturday morning, carrying the Venezuelan flag, singing together and hailing the military’s action as an act of freedom.

In Los Angeles, a different picture emerged as groups protesting Maduro’s arrest took to the streets, although none claimed to be of Venezuelan origin. At a gathering of 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.

The United States’ intervention in Venezuela has nothing to do with stopping the flow of drugs, he said, and everything to do with undermining the legitimate socialist government. Parker called for Maduro’s release as several protesters behind him chanted, “Hands off Venezuela.”

Parker said that when he visited Venezuela a few weeks ago as part of the US peacekeeping mission, he saw “the love the people had for Maduro.”

A recent demonstration in Pershing Square drew hundreds in the rain to protest US intervention. But when the speaker led chants of “No war in Venezuela,” a woman wearing a Venezuelan flag tried to approach him and speak into the microphone. A crowd of protesters surrounded him and took him away.

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

Part of one of the restaurant’s walls was covered in Venezuelan bank notes with messages written on them. Another reads: “3 de enero del 2026. Venezuela is free.”

Venezuela is free.

At midnight the night before, Paola started receiving messages on WhatsApp from her relatives in Venezuela. They said the power was out, and they sent videos of what sounded like bomb blasts.

Paola was shocked. He had left Venezuela at the age of 7 with his parents and siblings, first to Panama and later to the US, in 2023. But all his family stayed behind in Venezuela, and he didn’t know what was going on.

Paola and her family constantly check the television channels to get an idea of ​​what is happening. At around 1:30 am, President Trump announced that the US military had captured Maduro.

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

Due to the Venezuelan regime’s control over the media, his relatives did not know that their leader had been captured by the US military. “Are you telling me the truth?” Paola said asking her aunt.

Paola has not returned home for nine years. He remembers his grandmother’s and his grandmother’s cooking, especially caraotas negra, or black beans. As a child, he said, certain foods were so scarce that he had an apple for the first time after moving to Panama.

Paola said she is very grateful to Trump for ending decades of brutal rule that reduced her country to a shell of what it was.

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

For Torres Ramirez, it was difficult to show his appreciation for Trump’s success in Venezuela with the fear he felt as an immigrant under his leadership.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” she said. “Throughout this year, I’ve been persecuted. I had to deal with ICE – I had to go to my appointment in fear of losing everything because the immigration policies had changed and there was complete uncertainty. For a moment, I felt like I was in Venezuela. I felt persecuted right here.”

In a press conference on Saturday morning, Trump said Maduro is responsible for illegal drug trafficking in the US and the deaths of thousands of Americans. He repeated the baseless claim that the Maduro government emptied Venezuela’s prisons and mental institutions and “sent their worst and most violent monsters to the United States to steal American lives.”

“They sent everyone badly to the United States, but they’re gone, and now we have a border where no one crosses,” he said.

Trump also announced that the US would “go after” Venezuela and its vast oil reserves.

“We will run it professionally,” he said. “We’re going to have the biggest oil companies in the world come in and invest billions and billions of dollars and take that money, spend that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiaries will be the Venezuelan people.”

Torres Ramirez said that although he is happy about Maduro’s ouster, he is not sure how he will feel about Trump’s announcement that the US will take over Venezuela’s oil industry. It may not be good in the long term for Venezuela’s economy, he said, but US intervention is a win for the country’s political future if it means people can return home.

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

Andrade, a longtime U.S. citizen, said she hasn’t been to Venezuela in 25 years — until she missed the deaths of both parents. He said he was accused of treason for criticizing the jailing of political dissidents and undermining Venezuela’s democracy under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. He said he was concerned that Venezuela’s remaining political prisoners could be executed in retaliation for Maduro’s arrest.

“We tried everything – elections, marches, more elections … and it didn’t happen,” he said. “Maduro was getting worse, there was more pressure. If they had not removed him, we would never have recovered Venezuela.”

Although he does not want the US to solve the problems of other countries, he thanked Trump for the US involvement in Venezuela.

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