Veteran journalist Luis Galeano, one of at least 94 Nicaraguans whom the Ortega Murillo regime has stripped of citizenship in recent years for opposing the government, has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Galeano, who has continued critically reporting on the Sandinista government online through his platform, Café con voz, since shortly after arriving in the US in 2018, has had an asylum application pending for about seven years, according to his wife, Daykel Santamaría. He also has a work permit and a social security number, she said.
Nonetheless, shortly after beginning his second job driving Lyft on Monday morning in Florida, ICE agents pulled him over. As of Wednesday, Galeano was detained at Krome detention center in Miami. He has an immigration court date scheduled for 2 October, Santamaría said.
The Sandinista government also stripped Melendez of his citizenship; he’s now a US citizen, living in Washington DC. The denaturalization order also affected acclaimed novelist Sergio Ramírez and poet and writer Gioconda Belli. Melendez called the situation facing his friend “a double trauma – he escaped from his country because of his work and then the place where he sought refuge detains him due to their domestic politics”.
Galeano fled Nicaragua in December, 2018, days after police raided 100% Noticias, the outlet where he worked, and issued an order for his arrest. He arrived in Miami shortly thereafter and petitioned for asylum, according to Santamaría. Santamaría said she didn’t know if her husband was, effectively, a man without a country due to the 2023 measure denaturalizing him as a Nicaraguan.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had a two hour-plus hearing on “Confronting the Totalitarian Ortega-Murillo Regime.” Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar, committee chairperson, opened the hearing by denouncing how Daniel Ortega and Rosa Murillo “have spent years dismantling democracy”, and warned that “the Administration is paying attention, and Ortega and Murillo should consider themselves warned.” The disjunction between the US government locking up a journalist targeted by the Nicaraguan government for reporting on its totalitarian tendencies, while at the same time denouncing those same tendencies is an example of “the serious and profound contradictions” in the Trump administration when it comes to Nicaragua, said Ana María Méndez Dardón, Central America director at the Washington Office on Latin America. Galeano’s detention is one example many of “how due process is missing from the right to asylum” under the Trump administration, she added.
Salazar issued a statement after Galeano’s detention saying: “America must always know the difference between a criminal and a political exile.” Queries from the Guardian to the committee and several of its members were not answered. Galeano’s detention has also been denounced by Salazar’s GOP colleague in Florida, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who posted a statement on X saying, “The United States has long been a beacon of freedom for those persecuted by tyranny.
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