Socialist dictator of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro on Thursday vowed to “rescue” the two-year-old Venezuelan girl allegedly “kidnapped” by the U.S. as well as the 252 members of the Tren de Aragua deported to El Salvador, asserting to migrants that “the real dream is Venezuelan.”
The Venezuelan socialist regime centered its 2025 “May Day” communist holiday festivities around the narrative that American deportations of illegal Venezuelan migrants are “kidnappings” and not legal expulsions of violators of the law. The Maduro regime has particularly promoted the story of two-year-old child Maikelys Espinoza, who it claims was “kidnapped” after her parents, both Tren de Aragua members, were deported.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explained last week that the child’s parents entered the U.S. illegally and oversaw several Tren de Aragua-related criminal activities such as homicide, drug sales, extortion, sex trafficking, and kidnappings. The child was placed in foster care after her mother, Yorely Bernal, was deported to Venezuela, while the father is reportedly one of the 252 Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members detained in El Salvador.
Maduro, during his May Day speech at the “Great March of the Working Class” in Caracas, vowed to rescue the child and all the “kidnapped youth” in El Salvador, proclaiming that “there will be justice in the U.S. or an extreme right-wing dictatorship will have been imposed. The people of the U.S. wonder which path their nation will take.”
The socialist dictator stressed that he would hold opposition leader María Corina Machado and other Venezuelan “opposition” figureheads responsible for the fate of the child. According to Maduro, Machado and other Venezuelan politicians furthered the “narrative” that the Venezuelan migrants in the United States are “Tren de Aragua delinquents.”
“From Petare [the largest slum in Venezuela], today, May 1, before more than a million men and women who have mobilized in Caracas and before the millions who mobilized throughout the country, sooner rather than later, we are going to rescue our girl Maikelys Espinosa and the 253 kidnapped in El Salvador safe and sound,” Maduro said.
@nicolasmadurom Más temprano que tarde vamos a #Rescatar sana y salva a nuestra #Niña Maikelys Espinoza y a los 253 secuestrados en El Salvador.
♬ sonido original – Nicolás Maduro
Maduro, during his speech, asserted his “vision” of the future of Venezuela and claimed to Venezuelan migrants — many of whom fled from socialism — that “the real dream is the Venezuelan dream, where we build the true diversified economy and production together with the workers.”
“We have to follow the path of defending our land, it is our mission. I say it to all migrants, the only true homeland is called Venezuela, and we must take care of it,” Maduro said. “We cannot allow people without values and gratitude. Open your eyes.”
“If you want a better country, let’s join the fight. The homeland belongs to all of us, except to the criminals,” he continued. “The people must say no to fascism and yes to peace, to the future, to family reunion and to life.”
The child’s mother, Yorely Bernal, spoke to the regime’s main state-media propaganda outlet VTV on Thursday and claimed that the Trump administration never gave a “valid reason” for taking the child away from her before she was deported.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told me I was going to court, but I indicated that I didn’t want to give up my daughter. They never explained to me why I was detained, they only told me that the reason was because of the tattoos,” Bernal said. “When the plane was about to take off for Venezuela, the ICE officers completely ignored me and gave me no reason for my daughter and, to this day, I don’t know anything about her.”
Bernal urged the U.S. government to present evidence of the crimes she allegedly committed in that country and stressed, “If they have proof of what they say, prove it. They want to cover up the kidnapping of my daughter Maikelys Espinoza, by making me out to be a bad mother, but it is absolutely false. I demand the U.S. to show proof of what I am accused.”
In reality, DHS explained that Bernal allegedly oversaw Tren de Aragua’s recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution while her husband, Maiker Espinoza-Escalona, oversaw homicides, drug sales, kidnappings, extortion, sex trafficking, and operated a torture house. The couple had final orders of removal from a judge. The child was taken off the deportation flight manifest for her safety and welfare in cooperation with the Department of Health and Human Services.
The alleged “kidnapping” of two-year-old Maikelys Espinoza was also used by Nicaragua’s communist dictator Daniel Ortega to accuse President Donald Trump of committing “crimes against humanity” by deporting illegal migrants in the U.S. in an hour-long rant where he also complained about Trump’s tariff policies and the sanctions imposed on his authoritarian regime.
Maduro and numerous members of his regime’s top brass have repeatedly claimed that President Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador is comparable to the persecution of the Jewish people under Nazi Germany. According to Maduro, the Venezuelan deportees are detained in “concentration camps” run by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Maduro, who has vowed to do “everything necessary” to rescue the detained alleged Tren de Aragua members, rejected a formal proposal issued by President Bukele in April that involved sending 252 Venezuelan deportees home in exchange for the release of 252 of Maduro’s nearly 900 political prisoners. Bukele’s proposal called for the liberation of Venezuelan political prisoners as well as nearly 50 foreign nationals from over a dozen countries such as the United States, Argentina, Italy, Israel, and Puerto Rico.
While the “liberation” of the “kidnapped” child and demands for the release of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members from El Salvador were the main “May Day” focus, the Maduro regime also celebrated the communist holiday by providing Venezuelan workers with a purported wage hike described by state media as “miraculous” but correctly asserted as “misleading” by local labor union workers. The workers explained to international outlets that the purported new $160 monthly wages is mostly based on regime bonuses and not an actual wage raise and said “raise” is an “accounting artifice” that offsets foreign currency exchange disparities between official and black market rates.
The Venezuelan regime also celebrated May Day with a new episode of Súper Bigote (“Super Mustache”), Maduro’s cartoon superhero alter ego, meant to “pay homage to the indestructible strength of our working class, the indomitable heart of our Bolivarian revolution.”
@nicolasmadurom En este glorioso 1May, día del trabajador, nos reunimos para rendir homenaje a la fuerza indestructible de nuestra ClaseObrera, el indomable corazón de la RevoluciónBolivariana.
♬ sonido original – Nicolás Maduro
“You, men and women of this land, are the engine that drives Venezuela forward. Together, we face the missiles of sanctions, those economic weapons that seek to bend our sovereignty and our dignity,” Maduro’s cartoon persona said in the episode. “But here we are, standing up, demonstrating that the courage of the Venezuelan people has no limits. Every worker is a living example of resistance, struggle, and love for the homeland.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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