By Karen Zhu
Venezuelans were in disbelief after the United States military captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to New York City on federal drug charges. Many Venezuelans had lost hope that Venezuela will ever be rid of Maduro.
But the relief was fleeting. Maduro’s loyalists and government forces remain intact and what happens next for Venezuela depends on how U.S. President Donald Trump plans to “run” the country.
Some Venezuelans are optimistic about American foreign intervention in Venezuela, while others hold a grimmer view.
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Rizkallah Homsi, a lawyer and a former sergeant in the Venezuelan military who is currently applying for asylum in the U.S., is grateful that Trump ousted Maduro. Even though “Trump is not my favorite,” he said, given the dire poverty, hyperinflation, and human rights violations under Maduro’s regime, “I have to thank him for what he did for my country.”
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Homsi stands before his apartment refrigerator in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is good at cooking and knows how to make many dishes. His children, who are still in Venezuela, used to show him pictures of tasty foods on their phones, and he would have the confidence to make it for them. “I miss them terribly,” he said.
Homsi left Venezuela because life there was difficult. Economic collapse caused food insecurity in Venezuela. “People looked like zombies walking through the streets, skinny, very, very, very thin, malnourished, hungry,” Homsi said. The minimum monthly wage in Venezuela is $3. No one could afford to pay a lawyer. Now in the U.S., he works at a trading card company and sends money back to Venezuela to support his children.
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The Venezuelan flag hangs on the wall in Homsi’s apartment bedroom. He misses his homeland. He misses the days when Venezuela was one of the world’s top oil producers. The country’s oil wealth paid for welfare programs, universal healthcare, and education. “Everything was subsidized by oil revenues,” Homsi said. Now, there is no oil wealth to speak of.
Venezuela’s oil production decreased 75% since 1998, the year Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, came to power. Chávez and Maduro failed to invest in the maintenance of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and purged thousands of its skilled workforce in the oil industry who opposed their regime.
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Scholars of political science, geography and diaspora studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held a panel to discuss the nature and implications of U.S. military intervention in Venezuela.
Trump’s stated intention for ousting Maduro is to pressure Venezuela to allow U.S. oil companies access to its oil reserves, which are among the largest in the world. Other stated intentions include reducing drug trafficking and Venezuelan immigration to the U.S.
Caitlin Andrews-Lee, a professor of political science at UNC-Chapel Hill (first row on the left), said these intentions do not justify Trump’s military operations in Venezuela. She also said cocaine trafficking entering the U.S. from Latin America does not come from Venezuela, and the root underlying mass Venezuelan immigration is Venezuela’s poverty, political repression, and human rights abuses.
Addressing all of this requires much more effort than simply removing Maduro with his authoritarian regime still in place, Andrews-Lee said.
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Nadia Mosquera Muriel, an Afro-Venezuelan and a professor of African and Diaspora Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, was one of the speakers on the panel. She spoke about Afro-Venezuelans opposing U.S. military intervention.
Many of the U.S. military strikes were targeted along coastal regions, where there is a predominant Afro-Venezuelan population. Targeted areas included the Port of La Guaira, Carmen de Uria, and Mamo Plateau in La Guaira state, and the Higuerote Airport in Miranda state.
Mosquera expects the military intervention to exacerbate racial and class inequalities.
Afro-Venezuelans often come from a lower economic class than lighter-skinned Venezuelans and they have tended to support Maduro’s government because of his promises to serve the poor. However, Afro-Venezuelans were hit hardest by the economic failure under Maduro’s regime. This has alienated their support for Maduro.
Today, many Afro-Venezuelans hold a more nuanced stance of “not supporting the government, neither the opposition, neither U.S. military interventions,” Mosquera said.
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Miguel Angel Rodríguez Cárdenas, a student from Venezuela at UNC-Chapel Hill, shows an image of Chávez’s eyes on his phone.
In Venezuela, this stylized illustration of Chávez’s eyes appeared on billboards, people’s uniforms, and television—it was everywhere. Its ubiquity represented that “he was always watching,” Rodríguez said.
Censorship increased under Maduro after he succeeded Chávez. It was normal for fifth graders to have conversations about “so-and-so’s father got kidnapped,” Rodriguez said.
In 2015, Rodríguez and his family fled Venezuela.
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After arriving in the U.S., Rodríguez applied for asylum and Temporary Protection Status (TPS). He was granted TPS, but his asylum case is still pending. It has been nine years since he applied.
The U.S. immigration system is heavily backlogged, and each year more migrants from Venezuela continue to enter the U.S.
In 2025, Trump revoked TPS for Venezuelans. TPS allowed migrants to legally stay and work in the U.S. because of extraordinary and temporary conditions in their home country. Considering Maduro’s ouster, legislators have called for Trump to reinstate TPS for Venezuelans.
Even though Maduro is no longer in power, “I don’t think this situation in Venezuela is safe enough for people to go back,” Rodríguez said. “It’s like taking the king in a chessboard with all the other pieces still in place.”
Back in Venezuela, Rodríguez has family who are afraid to express their happiness about Maduro’s capture because they fear his loyalists will arrest them. In the days following Maduro’s capture, political censorship in Venezuela has increased.
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Katherine Ortiz Duque is the owner of Komagocho, a food truck serving Venezuelan food, in Cary, North Carolina. She has lived in the U.S. for the past 10 years.
When she saw photos of Maduro’s capture, Ortiz thought they were generated by AI. “And when I realized it was real, I was like, wow. It really is happening. It’s real,” she said.
Ortiz has always felt that it was impossible to remove Maduro. She is glad that he has been ousted, but she worries that if she returns to Venezuela, Maduro’s remaining government forces will see her as an outsider and subject her to political scrutiny.
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Ortiz serves tequeños (fried cheese sticks) and chicken pastelitos (deep-fried chicken pies) from her food truck. In Venezuela, people struggled to put food on the table.
Many Venezuelans, including Ortiz, did not want to leave Venezuela. Ortiz said they left because the circumstances forced them to. She said misses Venezuelan cuisine.
In establishing a new life in the U.S., “I wanted to bring a piece of Venezuela with me by opening a business around what I love and what we miss,” Ortiz said.
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Customers pose for a photo in front of Komagocho, which has become a gathering hub for Venezuelans in North Carolina. Komagocho customers are happy about Maduro’s ouster.
There is a shared sentiment of “Hey, we’re almost going home. Well, let’s take things calmly, but there really is a change, because that hope returns that where we left could get better,” Ortiz said.
Despite worries about what comes next for Venezuela, at least for now, Venezuelans rejoice.
