Sacramento reacts to US military strike on Venezuela. ‘It does break my heart’
Sacramento residents and local leaders had strong reactions Saturday — some of them outraged, some of them planning to protest downtown — following an early morning military strike by the United States against Venezuela.
The strike toppled the country’s president Nicolás Maduro, who is now in American custody and facing narco-trafficking charges. President Donald Trump said Saturday morning that the U.S. will run Venezuela for a time.
As Sacramentans learned of the news, the question for some might have been twofold: What to make of it, and, if they were opposed, what could be done locally to push back. It might have been a tall ask for many still in a winter holiday fog. But for several, ideas about what to do were already emerging.
Sacramento leaders react
In recent years, people from Venezuela have comprised a small group locally. U.S. Census figures from 2020 showed there were about 635 Venezuelans living in Sacramento County.
In 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis arranged for a flight to Sacramento of 36 migrants, several of them from Venezuela, who later said they felt deceived. “Human beings should be given consideration,” a 34-year-old Venezuelan man told The Sacramento Bee then.
Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang, who is challenging Rep. Doris Matsui for a Congressional seat, is the daughter of Hmong refugees. She said that children of refugees know the generational trauma and harm caused by international conflict.
“We know that nothing comes good out of war, just more lives, innocent lives lost, trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted,” Vang said. “The American people should be angry.”
John Hershey, a volunteer for NorCal Resist, said that Venezuelans in the county live east of Sacramento city limits. “The ones that I know personally, many are finding work, paying rent, supporting themselves and occasionally sending money back to their families, which is quite common with immigrant populations,” Hershey said.
Peter Kyung, a local immigration attorney who has worked with Venezuelans in the past two years, said that the Trump administration had ended temporary protected status as well as a parole program for migrants. “It does break my heart,” Kyung said.
Not everyone was condemning Saturday’s news. Kyung said that he knew that some Venezuelans in the United States were happy about the news. Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, drew criticism for his rule. Some Congressional Republicans in California were supportive of the strike.
Flojaune Cofer, who lost a close race in 2024 for Sacramento mayor and has been mulling a run for the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, said she was horrified by the news out of Venezuela.
Cofer said that she hadn’t interacted with any Venezuelan migrants in the past two years. She added that she’d been working with Sacramento Area Congregations Together (ACT) and NorCal Resist, two groups that have assisted this population.
“I feel this looming sense of disappointment that I’m not surprised,” Cofer said. “It feels like for now almost a year we just wake up every day to sort of a fresh betrayal of what used to be some established norms.”
Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty in a text message declined to comment.
Protesters take to 16th and J
After she got the news out of Venezuela, Susan Brown of an Indivisible-related group in East Sacramento texted with others in her group and kept an eye on mobilize.us, which provides information related to possible protests.
Brown said she was getting over being sick, so she didn’t know if she would be at a protest planned for 3 p.m. Saturday at 16th and J streets in Sacramento, near Memorial Auditorium.
“I would be out there,” Brown said. “I am really in opposition to the direction that this is going.”
Approximately 50 to 100 people attended the protest, taking to all four corners of the intersection with signs and chants. Eric Nelson, who led some chants during the event, said that it was part of “a nationally coordinated mobilization” through the Answer Coalition.
Protesters such as Tim Sandoval of South Natomas braved rain in the early going that eventually gave way to blue sky.
“We want people to know that we care and we want people to know that those people in the cars are not alone,” Sandoval said as some passing motorists honked their horns.
The event attracted both seasoned protesters and other more casual observers like Emily Crane, who is 27 and lives in Sacramento. Crane said she’d learned of the protest an hour before. She hoped people would see there were young people opposed to “the administration in general but especially war and unjust war and that people aren’t stupid.”
Some protesters such as Sacramento resident John Reiger, 84, who served in the military from 1959-62 and is now involved in Veterans For Peace, were pessimistic about what the event might accomplish.
“These kinds of protests aren’t going to make any difference to the Trump administration,” Reiger said. “Back in the ’60s and ’70s, the administration was afraid of us.”
James Fitzpatrick, a 68-year-old midtown resident, said he’d been feeling more guardedly optimistic in recent days. “Waking up to this news today is a setback, but it’s also going to, I think, galvanize people,” he said.
River Jones, 75, of Sacramento, said she’d come from a friend’s memorial to be at the protest.
“I really feel good that people were able to get a group together this fast in protest of what’s happening,” Jones said. “Because it seemed like it’s one thing after another.”
Other planned actions
Those wanting to take action about the news from Venezuela saw various paths in front of them.
Hershey said it was too soon to know precisely how NorCal Resist would assist. He added that his group would keep doing the kinds of things it had been doing, like providing legal and rental assistance when needed and training migrant communities on how to avoid pretextual traffic stops, such as for broken tail lights.
As for Vang, asked if she intended to introduce a resolution at Sacramento City Council, she said she “literally woke up this morning and this happened,” but that she would be speaking with the mayor and council. She noted that the city was already providing $500,000 in annual funding for the Family Unity Education and Legal Network.
Vang also saw the need for Congressional action.
“There are things we can be doing as Congressional reps at the federal level to send a message that we don’t want to use our tax dollars in endless wars,” Vang said.
Matsui, D-Sacramento, and other prominent California Democrats on Saturday condemned the military strike, saying Trump acted without authority of the legislative branch.
“Sending U.S. forces into another country without congressional authorization or notification to remove its government constitutes an unauthorized act of war by the president,” Matsui said in a statement. “This action demands accountability.”
Cofer urged that people “make some really urgent calls to our Congressional members to take direct action” and also organize locally, prepare for upcoming elections and operate with the understanding that democracy doesn’t just happen.
“We can’t just become so overwhelmed with kind of the fresh nightmare that we wake up to every day,” Cofer said. “There’s also a responsibility of all of us to be able to say, ‘And what are we going to do about it?’”
This story was originally published January 3, 2026 at 2:50 PM.
