Opposing crowds gather outside Manhattan courthouse during Nicolás Maduro arraignment

Opposing crowds gathered in a park outside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan as Nicolás Maduro was arraigned on the 26th floor, two days after a U.S. raid that removed him from Venezuela. The demonstrators, separated by metal barricades, wore Trump red, the red, blue and yellow of Venezuela and Palestinian kaffiyehs as chants in Spanish and English rose and fell.

One side cheered "Libertad!" while the other waved signs reading "U.S.A. Hands Off Venezuela" and "U.S. Out of Latin America," and shouts of "No blood for oil, hands off Venezuelan soil!" mixed with calls of "You’re not from Venezuela!" Some Venezuelan immigrants at the scene described personal grievances dating to years of repression.

Pedro Reyes, 39, said he had been imprisoned in Venezuela, doused with water and gasoline and shot at with rubber bullets; "They abused me," he said. Protesters pointed to symbols on both sides — Manhattan’s federal courthouse and Caracas’s El Helicoide, the secret police headquarters and jail — as meanings of the moment.

Alejandro Flores-Velazco said the prosecution and Mr. Maduro’s detention in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center "is about the people that are right now in jail, in Venezuela," while Nievelys Hernandez, a journalist, said, "The most I feel is freedom." Inside the courtroom, Mr.

Key Topics

World, Nicolás Maduro, Cilia Flores, Manhattan Federal Courthouse, El Helicoide, Metropolitan Detention Center