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WASHINGTON — Maria Eugenia Torres Ramirez was having dinner with her family in Los Angeles on Friday night when the flood of messages began. Word had begun to circulate that the U.S. was invading Venezuela and would seize its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Torres Ramirez, 38, fled her native country in 2021, settled in L.A. and has a pending application for asylum. Her family is scattered throughout the world — Colombia, Chile and France. Since her parents died, none of her loved ones remain in Venezuela.

Still, news that the autocrat who separated them had been captured delivered a sense of long-awaited elation and united the siblings and cousins across continents for a rare four-hour phone call as the night unfolded.

“I waited for this moment for so long from within 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 a jolt of relief.”

Many Venezuelans across the U.S. celebrated the military action that resulted in Maduro’s arrest. Economic collapse and political repression led roughly 8 million Venezuelans to emigrate since 2014, making it one of the world’s largest displacement crises.

About 770,000 live in the U.S. as of 2023, concentrated mainly in the regions of Miami, Orlando, Houston and New York. Just over 9,500 live in L.A., according to a 2024 U.S. 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 praising the military action as an act of freedom.

In Los Angeles, a different picture emerged as groups opposed to Maduro’s arrest took to the streets, though none identified themselves as being of Venezuelan descent. At a rally 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 had nothing to do with stopping the flow of drugs, he said, and everything to do with undermining a legitimate socialist government. Parker called for Maduro to be set free as a few dozen protesters behind him chanted, “Hands off Venezuela.”

Parker said when he visited Venezuela a few weeks ago as part of a U.S. peacemaking delegation, he saw “the love people had for Maduro.”

A later demonstration in Pershing Square drew hundreds out in the rain to protest the U.S intervention. But when a speaker led chants of “No war in Venezuela,” a woman draped in a Venezuelan flag attempted to approach him and speak into the microphone. A phalanx of demonstrators circled her and shuttled her away.

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

A portion of one of the restaurant’s walls was covered in Venezuelan bank notes scrawled with messages. One read: “3 de enero del 2026. Venezuela quedo libre.”

Venezuela is free.

Around midnight the night before, Paola started getting messages on WhatsApp from her relatives in Venezuela. The power was out, they said, and they forwarded videos of what sounded like bomb blasts.

Paola was terrified. She’d left Venezuela at age 7 with her parents and siblings, first for Panama and later the U.S., in 2023. But the rest of her family remained in Venezuela, and she had no idea what was going on.

Paola and her family stayed up scanning television channels for some idea of what was happening. Around 1:30 a.m., President Trump announced that U.S. forces had captured Maduro.

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

Because of the Venezuelan state’s control over media, her relatives had no idea their leader had been seized by U.S. forces. “Are you telling me the truth?” Paola said her aunt asked.

Paola hasn’t been home in nine years. She misses her grandmother and her grandmother’s cooking, especially her caraotas negras, or black beans. As a child, she said, certain foods were so scarce that she had an apple for the first time only after moving to Panama.

Paola said she was grateful to Trump for ending decades of authoritarian rule that had reduced her home country to a shell of what it once was.

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

For Torres Ramirez, it was difficult to square her appreciation for Trump’s accomplishment in Venezuela with the fear she has felt as an immigrant under his presidency.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” she said. “Throughout the course of this whole year, I have felt persecuted. I had to face ICE — I had to go to my appointment with the fear that I could lose it all because the immigration policies had changed and there was complete uncertainty. For a moment, I felt as if I was in Venezuela. I felt persecuted right here.”

During a news conference Saturday morning, Trump said Maduro was responsible for trafficking illicit drugs into the U.S. and the deaths of thousands of Americans. He repeated a baseless claim that the Maduro government had emptied Venezuela’s prisons and mental institutions and “sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives.”

“They sent everybody bad into the United States, but no longer, and we have now a border where nobody gets through,” he said.

Trump also announced that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela and its vast oil reserves.

“We’ll run it professionally,” he said. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world go in and invest billions and billions of dollars and take that money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are going to be the people of Venezuela.”

Torres Ramirez said that while she’s happy about Maduro’s ouster, she’s unsure how to feel about Trump’s announcement saying the U.S. will take over Venezuela’s oil industry. Perhaps it won’t be favorable in the long term for Venezuela’s economy, she said, but the U.S. 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 remaining involved until there is a transition of power.

Andrade, a longtime U.S. citizen, said she hasn’t been to Venezuela in 25 years — even missing the deaths of both parents. She said she was accused of treason for denouncing the imprisonment of political opponents and the degradation of Venezuela’s democracy under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. She said she worries that Venezuela’s remaining political prisoners could be killed as payback for Maduro’s arrest.

“We tried everything — elections, marches, more elections … and it couldn’t be done,” she said. “Maduro was getting worse and worse, there was more repression. If they hadn’t removed him, we were never going to recover Venezuela.”

While she doesn’t want the U.S. to fix the problems of other countries, she thanked Trump for U.S. involvement in Venezuela.

She said she can’t wait to visit her remaining family members there.

Palestinian rights advocates are praising New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for revoking pro-Israel municipal decrees within hours of his inauguration, a move that was promptly condemned by the Israeli government.

On Thursday, his first day in office, Mamdani wiped out all the executive orders his predecessor, Eric Adams, implemented after September 26, 2024, the day Adams was charged with bribery.

One of the orders restricted boycotts of Israel and prohibited mayoral appointees from issuing contracts “that discriminate against the State of Israel, Israeli citizens, or those associated” with the US ally.

It was signed by Adams less than a month ago and was seen by critics as an attempt to create controversy for the incoming Mamdani administration.

Another now-nixed decree adopted a controversial definition of anti-Semitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which advocates say can be used to censor and penalise speech critical of Israel.

Nasreen Issa, a member of the Palestine Youth Movement – NYC, said Israel and its supporters have long pushed for the “criminalisation of dissent”.

“So, Mamdani’s rejection of this is a positive step towards protecting the rights of New Yorkers and the dignity of Palestinians,” Issa told Al Jazeera.

Afaf Nasher, the head of the New York chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), also applauded Mamdani for revoking an “unconstitutional order restricting the ability of New Yorkers to criticize the Israeli government’s racism or boycott Israel’s human rights abuses”.

“This unconstitutional, Israel First attack on free speech should have never been issued in the first place,” Nasher said in a statement.

Nasher further slammed the IHRA definition, saying that the “overly broad” guidelines frame disagreement with Zionism as anti-Semitic.

“The order would have also unconstitutionally limited boycotts against only Israel,” Nasher said.

Palestinian rights supporters have long rejected the IHRA definition, which heavily focuses on Israel. The definition provides 11 examples of anti-Semitism, six of which involve Israel.

They include “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel.

“I think it’s wonderful that Mayor Mamdani took measures on day one to reinforce our rights to free speech, which included our right to criticize and oppose Israeli apartheid and genocide,” said YL Al-Sheikh, a Palestinian-American writer active in the Democratic Socialists of America.

“The IHRA being implemented as government policy isn’t about combatting antisemitism but about stifling dissent and this should be something all Americans oppose.”

Israel weighs in

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs decried Mamdani’s moves on Friday, saying that the newly inaugurated mayor is showing “his true face”.

“This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire,” it said in a post on the social media platform X.

Separately, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs, deployed Islamophobic language to criticise Mamdani’s decision.

He called the mayor a “Hamas sympathiser” and drew a connection between him and the Muslim mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

“When a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist whose slogan is ‘Globalize the Intifada’ takes control of New York City or London, these are exactly the decisions you get,” Chikli wrote on X.

Neither Mamdani nor Khan has any known connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Issa said the intense Israeli response is not about the mayor’s policy moves but is rather aimed at controlling the narrative.

“Israel’s main approach – at the highest level, at the level of the Foreign Ministry – has been to push for the criminalisation of protected speech through these warped definitions of anti-Semitism like the IHRA,” she said.

“Since they’re losing in the court of public opinion, the response now is to push for the criminalisation of dissent.”

Issa also called Chikli’s attack on Mamdani “blatant Islamophobia, racism and disinformation”.

“They’re trying to promote these accusations that have no basis in reality whatsoever,” Issa told Al Jazeera.

“But from their perspective, any support for Palestinians, any opposition to Israel’s genocide or the conduct of its military – whether in Gaza or the West Bank, over the last two years, over the last decades – none of that is acceptable.”

Al-Sheikh said it was “absurd” that Israel is trying to impose its preferences on local policies in New York.

“Even Americans who aren’t Palestinian or pro Palestine can see this is strange and inhibits our rights,” Al-Sheikh said.

“It’s also weirdly counterproductive on Israel’s part since it only makes Mamdani look better. A single policy paper that said you can’t criticise a country was repealed and now they claim it is the end of the world, but ‘you should be allowed to criticise any country you want’ is the universal American position.”

Israel was not alone, however, in denouncing Mamdani’s actions. The administration of President Donald Trump also issued a warning to the Mamdani administration.

Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said her office would be vigilant “to ANY AND ALL violations of religious liberties” in New York.

“We will investigate, sue, and indict as needed,” Dhillon wrote in a social media post.

Palestine solidarity activists often stress that criticising Israeli abuses should not be conflated with attacking Judaism.

Mamdani’s rise

Mamdani has been a vocal critic of Israeli policies against Palestinians, prompting accusations of anti-Semitism from Israel’s supporters.

But he has repeatedly promised to protect Jewish residents. During his inauguration ceremony, he pledged to continue the Mayor’s Office to Combat Anti-Semitism (MOCA), an Adams-era development, and he told reporters his administration would “celebrate and cherish” Jewish New Yorkers.

The new mayor, 34, took the oath of office on a copy of the Quran at the turn of the new year, becoming the first Muslim mayor of America’s largest city.

The Democratic socialist, who formerly served as a state legislator, had minimal name recognition when he first announced his candidacy late in 2024.

But he steadily grew his base of support with a message focused on affordability and housing.

Last June, he defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination, in one of the most stunning political upsets in recent US history.

Mamdani then defeated Cuomo again in the general elections in November, after the ex-governor relaunched his campaign as an independent with Trump’s support.

Adams was elected as a Democrat in 2021, but his administration faced numerous scandals during its four-year term, including accusations that Adams had entered into a quid pro quo with representatives from the Turkish government.

Earlier in 2024, Trump’s Justice Department dropped the federal bribery charges he faced. Adams had launched a re-election campaign as an independent, but he ultimately suspended his bid and backed Cuomo before the elections.

While Mamdani’s platform was largely focused on local issues, some of his supporters have argued that his vocal support for Palestinian rights helped propel his campaign amid the growing anger at Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.