Depending on whom you ask, Nicolás Maduro is either the President, the former President, or the President turned dictator of Venezuela. In an indictment unsealed over the weekend, the Trump Administration calls him “the de facto but illegitimate ruler of the country.” But, in a Manhattan courtroom, on Monday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein wasn’t interested in Maduro’s title, formal or otherwise. He only asked what judges routinely ask federal defendants during their first appearances before a magistrate, right before they’re arraigned on criminal charges. “Are you, sir, Nicolás Maduro Moros?” the judge asked.

That’s when Maduro—dressed in navy, and wearing shackles and headphones, so that he could hear the court interpreter—stood up and, in his native Spanish, told the judge who he was and how he’d arrived inside a United States courtroom. “Soy el Presidente constitucional de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela,” Maduro responded, before explaining that the U.S. government had kidnapped him and his wife from their home in Caracas on January 3rd, and that he was invoking the protections of international treaties. “I consider myself a prisoner of war,” he said.

Judge Hellerstein interrupted Maduro and reminded him that he had asked a simple yes-or-no question. “I only want to know one thing: Are you Nicolás Maduro Moros?”

“I am Nicolás Maduro Moros,” the defendant confirmed. During her own allocution moments later, Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, likewise struck a note of defiance and introduced herself as the First Lady of Venezuela, her face appearing bruised and bandaged. (Later in the hearing, her lawyer indicated that she may have suffered a fracture or severe bruising to her ribs during her arrest.)

That was only the start of a simultaneously dramatic yet profoundly quotidian hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a venue long renowned for proceedings against corrupt politicians, Mafia figures, drug kingpins, and even former heads of state—such as Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernández, who after his extradition, in 2022, was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on federal drug-trafficking and weapons charges not unlike the ones Maduro faces. (On the week of Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump pardoned Hernández, just days after pardoning a turkey.) The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse, together with the neighboring Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, which houses the federal appeals court, has been the battleground for numerous Trump-era legal controversies across his two Presidencies. Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Eric Adams are among the figures in the President’s orbit who have sought, faced, or eluded justice, in one way or another, in these marbled halls.