A protest in Brooklyn, New York, calling for the release of Cilia Flores and her husband, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Photo: Bárbara Larissa.
By Melinda Butterfield – Mar 9, 2026
On International Women’s Day, March 8, a crowd marched to MDC Brooklyn, a federal detention center in the Sunset Park neighborhood, to demand freedom for Venezuelan First Combatant Cilia Flores and President Nicolás Maduro, as well as more than 200 ICE detainees held captive there. Flores and Maduro were illegally kidnapped by the Trump regime in early January.
The action was organized by Brooklyn Against War and supported by New York Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, Black Alliance for Peace, Struggle for Socialism Party, Students for a Democratic Society, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, December 12 Movement, Code Pink, Workers World Party and others. Members of a Baltimore solidarity caravan for Maduro and Flores also joined the march.
Following are remarks given by Melinda Butterfield of the Struggle for Socialism Party and Women in Struggle-Mujeres en Lucha:
The Bolivarian Revolution opened up new opportunities for Venezuelan women and queer people to struggle for bodily autonomy, equality, and their rightful place as members and leaders of the people’s movement. These struggles have seen great advances as well as setbacks during this decades-long process of transformation.
We all know that the Trump regime and U.S. imperialism want to control Venezuela’s oil and its oil profits, which Comandante Hugo Chávez put at the service of the Venezuelan people. But it’s not the only thing they want.
They want to foreclose the opportunities for struggle by Afro-Venezuelan women, Indigenous women, trans women, lesbian women, and all Venezuelan women, just as they are trying to crush our bodily autonomy here. They want to snuff out the Bolivarian Revolution as an example for women, queers, and all working people in Latin America.
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The prisoners of war held here at MDC Brooklyn, First Combatant Cilia Flores and President Nicolás Maduro, represent the Bolivarian revolutionary process that the Republican fascists and their Democratic collaborators want to destroy. That makes their kidnapping and imprisonment a matter of highest importance for women all over the world, including women here in Brooklyn.
The Bolivarian Revolution is a true expression of democracy for the people, not the capitalists. The “democracy” U.S. imperialism wants to bring to Venezuela is the sort that murders school girls in Iran, kidnaps immigrant students off the streets of Minneapolis, starves Palestinian kids in Gaza, and strips trans youth in Brooklyn of their right to life-saving health care. That “democracy” is not worth a damn to women in Venezuela or here!
As Trump’s regime attempts to consolidate fascism, its frontal attacks on all of our rights show how our futures are bound together. From Iran to Minneapolis, and from Gaza to Brooklyn, we are all facing the same enemy.
And we all have the same weapon to fight back and win: unity. We must unite our struggles, first to survive – and then to win power and ensure U.S. imperialism, the greatest enemy of the world’s people, can never raise its ugly head again.
Long live the revolutionary women of Venezuela and Cuba!
Free Cilia Flores and Nicolás Maduro!
Free them all!
Tear down the walls!
