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An illegal migrant who was convicted of kicking an NYPD cop in the infamous Times Square brawl last year was given a hearty welcome home by a top official in Venezuela — which dissidents of the narco state say is a big middle finger to the United States.
Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel, 19, was greeted with a warm hug by the Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace, Diosdado Cabello, after he stepped off a deportation flight Monday.
Pictures show Gomez-Izquiel with his arms outstretched before a smiling Cabello, a hardliner of the socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro, tightly embraced him.
The Trump administration deported the violent teen after he was convicted in the wild, caught-on-camera January 2024 assault, in which a rowdy mob pounced on a pair of NYPD officers, launching kicks to their heads and bodies.
Venezuelan dissident Daniel DiMartino said that the hero’s welcome by the high-ranking regime official lends “credibility to the idea advanced by Trump that Maduro is using illegal immigration as a tool to attack the United States,” adding that “these criminals should be imprisoned in El Salvador or here, not rewarded with return to Venezuela.”
Patricia Andrade, who runs the Miami-based Venezuela Awareness Foundation, said the image “confirms” that Gomez-Izquiel’s criminal “mission” in the US “was accomplished.”
Earlier this month, President Trump signed off on a presidential action invoking a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act in order to use wartime authority to speed up mass deportations of illegal migrants, targeting those suspected of being involved with the brutal Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua.
“Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA,” Trump wrote in a statement.
“The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.”
Wesley Tabor, a former Drug Enforcement Administration official who served as the agency’s country attaché in Venezuela, also warned that criminals from the South American country are in cahoots with the Maduro regime, all thanks to “our own US government under the Biden administration.”
It is unclear if Gomez-Izquiel was affiliated with TdA, but the teen was filmed viciously grabbing an NYPD cop while kicking another outside a migrant shelter at West 42nd Street near Seventh Avenue during the Jan. 27, 2024, melee.
The teen served just eight months behind bars after pleading guilty to second-degree assault and was then taken into custody by ICE agents in October.
He was initially released without bail — and then re-arrested just two weeks later for a violent robbery at a Macy’s outlet in Queens, where he allegedly acted as a lookout while one of his cohorts punched a store security guard, cops said.
Gomez-Izquiel crossed the Texas border illegally in 2023 and was immediately deported to Mexico, according to ICE.
A few months later, he tried again and was successfully released into the US by border agents.
The Trump administration has sought to crack down on migrant crime by carrying out its mass deportation effort.
The effort ramped up with a series of flights that sent dozens of suspected TdA gangbangers to El Salvador, where they were locked up in the country’s notorious hell-hole megaprison.
US District Judge James Boasberg, however, quickly ordered the administration to turn the planes around.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the Obama-appointed judge “had no lawful basis” to enforce the order since the “terrorist TdA aliens” had already been deported.
The Venezuelan gang was designated as a foreign terror organization by President Trump’s State Department last month.
