With deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro making his first court appearance Monday in New York on charges related to drug trafficking, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Maduro "deserves to be brought to justice" and pointed to the large number of Venezuelan exiles in Florida.

"For many, many years, we've seen the country of Venezuela suffering under the yoke of Marxist ideology, first with (the late President) Hugo Chavez and then with Nicholas Maduro, and we've had a lot of people in the state of Florida that have firsthand knowledge of that," DeSantis said during an appearance in Baker County. 

He added that it "my sincere hope is that the people of Venezuela are going to be able to liberate themselves from the yoke of the Chavez-Maduro reign, because it has been one of the most destructive reigns of any in the Western Hemisphere's history." 

Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried in a statement expressed hope that the U.S. military action Saturday to remove Maduro "opens a real path to democracy for the Venezuelan people, who deserve the chance to seat their true, democratically elected president, Edmundo González," an opposition leader and former presidential candidate. 

But Fried said the White House "appears far more about oil than about democracy," and that the military action bypassed Congress.

"Acting without congressional authorization risks deepening chaos and instability, prolonging the very illegitimacy this action claims to end," Fried said.