Manhattan’s Baxter Street, a narrow Chinatown thoroughfare outside the courthouse where Venezuela’s deposed president and his wife were being arraigned Monday, became a rough demarcation line of ideologies.
O n the west side were backers of President Donald Trump and the invasion of Venezuela he ordered to seize President Nicolás Maduro. On the east: a much larger group assailing Trump and the United States and demanding, as signs read: “U.S.A. HANDS OFF VENEZUELA” and “FREE PRESIDENT MADURO.” And inside a playground were Venezuelans decrying Maduro.
The NYPD established the demarcation line on Baxter after a brief skirmish between the sides broke out earlier in the morning before the crowd swelled to hundreds who crammed into barricades along Worth Street, across from the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, where Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were arraigned on a criminal indictment.
In freezing temperatures beneath intermittent snowflakes, the jumble of ideologies and their believers shouted, sang, chanted, argued, picketed, snapped photos and traded accusations. The blocks around the courthouse itself — particularly Pearl Street — were shut down, guarded by NYPD cops and state court officers and deputy U.S. marshals and Drug Enforcement Administration agents and heavily armed, helmeted men from the Department of Homeland Security. Blocks away, bored-looking NYPD cops sat in NYPD vans waiting to be deployed in case of mass disorder, a standard department practice. (There was not mass disorder, and those cops left later.)
Down by the courthouse, Venezuela’s tricolor flag was draped across a jungle gym, held aloft inside the Columbus Park playground by Spanish-speaking men chanting “Gloria al Bravo Pueblo,” the nation’s national anthem (“Glory to the Brave People”). One man in the group lifted his arms to show a paper depicting Maduro’s silhouette: “MADURO OUT.”
But while the west side of Baxter held supporters of Trump and what the U.S. did over the weekend in seizing Maduro, the east side had some supporters of Maduro’s ouster, mixed in with opponents.
“TRUMP FOR KING” was hoisted in the air feet from a sign illustrated by drawings of hands of different races in an embrace shaking — the two separated by a “≠.”
“WHEN WILL WE EVER LEARN,” the sign read.
Venezuelan newspaper reporter Carola Briceño investigated the Maduro family’s alleged corruption in Venezuela — and was arrested by his government in 2016 and accused of terrorism. She eventually came to America in 2023 under a refugee resettlement program.
“Maduro asked for my head!” she said outside the courthouse Monday.
Briceño said she’s grateful Trump went in and got Maduro but thinks more of his family and greater orbit need to be in jail — maybe 60 people.
If Trump didn’t do it, she said, who would?
His local fans came to the pens outside the courthouse to praise him.
“Donald Trump is a hero!” one man shouted in a New York accent, repeatedly proclaiming “libre!” or freedom, spicing up his remarks with the occasional curse word, pumping his fist in the air to inveigh against socialism and communism.
A bit of capitalism was at work up the street, where a man stood on the corner of Worth and Centre streets hawking Venezuelan flags, $10 each.
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.