A group of young men stood atop a jungle gym in a Manhattan playground, draping Venezuelan flags down the side of it and flipping middle fingers to onlookers. Across the street from the federal courthouse where Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores were arraigned Monday afternoon on drug-trafficking charges, the flags could be found every few steps, and they could be purchased from an opportunistic street vendor.
Two sets of protesters had formed, divided by police barriers, with one cheering the dramatic capture of the Venezuelan president and his wife—and the American president who orchestrated it—and another objecting to the military operation on foreign soil that led to their capture. Kujo, a member of the anti-imperialist organization International League of Peoples’ Struggle, who asked to be identified only by his first name, took stock of a curious but fitting artifact of the moment: a double-sided flag with Venezuela on one side, MAGA on the other.
“How’s that for diversity?” Kujo said.
Kujo recognized that there was a contingent of Venezuelans on the other side of the metal dividers who were cheering Maduro’s day in court out of discontent with the state of their country. “But we want to be able to connect those experiences of invasion with our own,” he said. One of his fellow protesters was passing around fliers. “FREE PRESIDENT MADURO AND CILIA FLORES,” the notice began, before offering a list of demands: “End all sanctions on Venezuela…end all military, economic, cyber, and information warfare…stop the regime-change campaign now!”
Maduro and Flores are now being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, a Brooklyn federal jail notorious for its poor conditions as well as its high-profile inmates: in recent years alone, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Sam Bankman-Fried, Luigi Mangione, and Ghislaine Maxwell. According to Sam Mangel, a federal prison consultant who said he has been in touch with an employee at the facility, Bureau of Prisons director William Marshall personally toured the MDC before Maduro’s arrival, which Mangel described as “highly atypical.” (Mangel has advised clients including Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro on navigating federal incarceration, drawing on his experience serving time for wire fraud.)
Mangel said that on Sunday, in the lead-up to Maduro’s arraignment, the whole facility went on lockdown. (It was one of a range of logistical challenges surrounding the arrest: Airspace was closed for US-registered aircraft in the Caribbean this past weekend.) According to Mangel’s contact, Maduro is being held in solitary confinement with checkups every 15 to 30 minutes “to make sure that nothing’s happened to him,” particularly in the aftermath of Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide while in federal custody. “He is going to be treated like every other high-security inmate, regardless of his profile,” Mangel said, though he noted, “I believe a lot of what you’re seeing now is pomp and circumstance.”
On Saturday night, the White House posted to social media footage of Maduro’s perp walk in New York. In Donald Trump’s own account, the extraction of the Venezuelan leader had all the elements of a cinematic thriller. “I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show,” he told Fox News. Afterward, Trump posted an image of Maduro blindfolded and handcuffed.
By Monday, Maduro and Flores were sitting in navy and orange prison garb in a courtroom, their legs shackled as they were flanked by their attorneys. If it seemed to Maduro like an occasion to publicly reflect on the remarkable circumstances of the occasion—to engage in the stakes at the same level of theater that Trump had—the 92-year-old judge in the case, Alvin Hellerstein, reminded him that the 30-minute hearing amounted to something more procedural. As Maduro stood and began to speak in Spanish about his capture, Hellerstein interrupted and said, “There will be time and place to get into all of this.” For now, he was asking for only the basic details: a confirmation of identity and an entry of a plea.
