Venezuelans in New York protest Delcy Rodríguez’s visit: ‘She doesn’t represent us, she wasn’t elected’

Nine months ago, the Venezuelan artist and illustrator Jorge “El Niño” Torrealba managed to bring his sketchbook into the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on the day that Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores first appeared before Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Fired up, Torrealba quickly sketched the outlines of the pair, who stood accused of drug trafficking.

“I thought everything was going to change at that moment,” he recalls. “In fact, I pictured myself going back to my country, but unfortunately things are only getting worse.” Today the tone of his illustrations has shifted: the Statue of Liberty kicking Delcy Rodríguez’s rear, or the acting president of Venezuela depicted as a vampire clutching the bleeding spire of the iconic Empire State Building.

Since the start of the year, when by order of the Donald Trump administration the U.S. military captured Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela began to feel like a different country than the one Venezuelans in exile had expected. “It has changed in a way we don’t understand. How can they remove the dictator but leave virtually the same dictatorship inside?” Torrealba asks. “There are other interests at play that are not those of the Venezuelan people, who want freedom of speech, the ability to work, decent housing, decent wages, not the kind of inflation that is destroying the country.”

As he speaks, he lifts up a small figure that outlines Rodríguez in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, north of the United Nations headquarters, where the 81st General Assembly opened on Tuesday. Inside the building the acting president rushed over to exchange words with Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, while outside a group of Venezuelans joined a protest to express their rejection not only of Rodríguez’s presence in New York but of her being president of Venezuela at all.

“I’m devastated because what’s at stake in Venezuela isn’t just politics. We’re talking about sentiment, we’re talking about the moral authority behind a political decision,” says Luis Patiño, a Venezuelan activist who traveled from Washington to New York to join the protest. “We’re talking about a torturing regime, about a drug-trafficking regime. She doesn’t represent us, she wasn’t elected. And they are making state decisions, striking financial and oil deals that involve 30-, 40- or 50-year commitments with someone who should not be in power.”

This Tuesday, after landing at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Rodríguez was seen leaving a building in Manhattan as several media outlets approached. People began asking her questions: “When will there be elections in Venezuela?” “Madam Delcy, when will you free the political prisoners?” Someone even threw out a question that sounds almost paradoxical: “Delcy, do you plan to visit Nicolás Maduro while you are in New York?”

When Maduro was captured on January 3, Rodríguez said that the country was still governed by “a single president, whose name is Nicolás Maduro.” But now, near the end of the year and only a few miles from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where the former Chavista president is being held, Rodríguez did not even mention him when asked.

“The U.S. government is playing and dancing very closely with people who have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Venezuelans,” says Patiño, who voted for Trump in 2024, never imagining what he would end up doing to his country. “He opened the door for her to be here. He needs to show her off like a toy, like a prize. This is a show.”

Venezuelans, victims of Trump’s deportation machinery

While dozens of people protested against Rodríguez in New York, in Miami a group of Venezuelans were demonstrating for another reason, albeit a related one. In front of Doral City Hall, the city with the largest Venezuelan diaspora in the United States, community leaders, activists and local officials demanded an end to the White House’s campaign of harassment against the Venezuelan community in South Florida as part of Trump’s immigration policy.

The president has made no exceptions for Venezuelan immigrants, even though their country of origin is under U.S. custodianship following Maduro’s arrest. Arrests and deportations of these citizens have continued, even after the devastating June earthquake, with Rodríguez’s green light.

In the Doral area, nicknamed Doralzuela, west of Miami, where about 40% of the population is of Venezuelan origin — including tens of thousands who fled the Chavista regime — Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations have intensified in recent months.

That has created a climate of fear on the streets of the Venezuelan enclave, where numerous immigrant arrests have been reported. On social media some say it resembles a ghost town; restaurants near Doral’s usually busy downtown are nearly empty.

Like the El Gochito food truck, which used to fill up at lunchtime with warehouse and airport-area workers stopping by to eat. Its owner, Venezuelan Miguel Ángel Flores, says that now on a good day he serves about 15 people. “Since about a month ago our sales have dropped by at least 70%,” says Flores, 39, who has lived in the U.S. for 11 years and has run his business in Doral for five. Flores had two employees, whom he had to lay off. “People aren’t going out for fear that ICE will take them,” he adds. He knows at least three businesses in the area that have had to close.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition