By early September 2024, Joaquín was 76 years old and had been imprisoned for 17 months in the Nicaraguan prison known as La Modelo, 20 kilometers from Managua. A former member of the Sandinista Front, he fought during the 1970s to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship. But in April 2023, he was arrested on charges of cybercrimes and public disorder under a different dictatorship: that of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, former Sandinista revolutionaries.
He had participated in the April 2018 uprising, sparked by social security reforms and widespread discontent with the dictatorship. International bodies later found that, between 2018 and 2019, state forces killed 355 people and that, through March 2025, the state carried out over 5,000 arbitrary detentions.
Inside La Modelo, September 4, 2024 was busier than usual. Joaquín and other inmates sang Nicaragua’s national anthem. The guards went from cell to cell asking if the inmates were in good health or if they needed water. At 5 p.m., some inmates were taken out of their cells to shower, even though the usual routine was a morning shower. They were given clean clothes and new shoes.
Joaquín and his son, who was imprisoned alongside him, speculated that a prison transfer was afoot or, as a more distant possibility, perhaps they would go free.
Then the guards turned the key and let Joaquín, his son, and a man from a neighboring cell, Felipe, out. They met in the hallway of the lower level of Wing 2. Dozens of inmates, from a group of prisoners of conscience, were kneeling facing the wall. They all boarded buses to another area of the prison, where they were given a sandwich and a soda. In an adjacent room, their passports were ready. Doctors conducted medical checkups on the older inmates. Joaquín, his son, and Felipe underwent the checkup, then signed forms and were handed a passport, valid until 2034.
In the early morning hours of September 5, the shoemakers, teachers, lawyers, journalists, and religious leaders who had participated in the 2018 protests were loaded onto other buses which, after a 30-minute ride, arrived at Augusto Sandino International Airport. Their passports were stamped and they boarded an Omni Air flight, met by members of the U.S. Department of State.
Amid hugs and smiles, they were told they had been released and that their options were to go to Guatemala and later be resettled in other countries — or remain in prison. Everyone agreed to leave.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the United States had secured the release of 135 political prisoners and that they would have legal avenues to apply for resettlement in the United States or elsewhere. Guatemala also promised resettlement aid. That morning, the Nicaraguans landed in Guatemala City, a place most of them viewed only as a waypoint.
Little did Joaquín and other Nicaraguans in the group know that another lonely sentence had just begun: their miserable exile in Guatemala.
Political Prisoners Expelled from Nicaragua Land in US Limbo
Despite their recently stamped passports, the group of 135 was the last to be released from prison, exiled, and stripped of their nationality upon departure. The first group arrived in Washington in February 2023. Six days later, the regime stripped dozens of Nicaraguans already in exile of their citizenship. In January and August 2024, various groups of Nicaraguan clergy were expelled.
The fate of Joaquín’s group was varied. For many, the U.S. government broke their promise. Guillermo Montalván —an attorney at the Memory and Justice Association representing the group in proceedings before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights— told El Faro English that the United States denied resettlement to 39 of the 135 individuals. He said the U.S. government asserted that they had committed crimes such as terrorism, ignoring that these were crimes fabricated by the dictatorship.
El Faro sought an answer from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about why these cases were denied. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services deferred to the State Department, but the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs did not respond.
There is at least one documented case of resettlement through the U.S. government’s Safe Mobility program: journalist Víctor Tacay. According to a lawyer familiar with the cases, at least 77 were admitted to the United States. Others, with help from the UNHCR and the IOM, sought resettlement in Costa Rica, Panama, and Canada.
Almost two years have passed since their exile. At least 24 former political prisoners and their families remain in Guatemala. Some survive on donations from Nicaraguans in the United States. Many are unemployed and have begun to seek asylum. Their children have missed an entire school year. If they fall ill, they cannot afford medication. They live on the outskirts of Guatemala City, in communal houses or shelters. Some have nothing more than a Nicaraguan passport, a document now invalidated by the regime.
One morning in June, Joaquín sang the Nicaraguan national anthem, this time in a small room in Guatemala City that barely fits an old piece of furniture as a bed. Before his imprisonment, he had a home in Nicaragua and wanted for nothing. Six other Nicaraguan political exiles also shared their stories, agreeing to be interviewed anonymously.
Surrounded by the deafening noise of his neighbors’ music, Joaquín barely leaves his room to use the communal bathroom. His room is so small that a sofa takes up half the space. “When we were in La Modelo, we had food, and here we have nothing. I often feel like going back and sneaking into Nicaragua through a blind spot,” he says. He lives on donations from other Nicaraguans. He’s behind on his rent: 10 quetzales a day, just over a dollar. The landlord has even forgiven months of debt.
David supported the 2018 protests, transporting people in an old truck to various locations. In 2021, he fled the capital to Chinandega due to police harassment. He went into hiding for two years, until he returned to Managua and was captured in June 2023. He spent 15 months in prison.
A former mechanic’s assistant, he has been out of work for four months since he underwent surgery for an infection that nearly cost him his foot due to diabetes. When he went to a public hospital for treatment, they gave him painkillers. Days later, he developed a high fever. Parishioners from a church took him to a private doctor. He survived thanks to donations from those parishioners and from Nicaraguans living in Canada.
“The true horror of exile isn’t the day they expel you; it’s when time passes and you have no job; you get sick and have no money. When your daughter asks to go to school and you have no way to help her, that is the true horror of exile,” he says.
Of the group of September 2024 exiles, 24 remain in Guatemala. Most have their immediate families in the country: 11 spouses, a newborn, and eight children who arrived in the ensuing weeks or months. The children lack the documentation needed to enroll in the Guatemalan school system and have already missed at least a year of school.
His wife and daughter reached him in Guatemala after crossing through a blind spot on the border between Nicaragua and Honduras. They had hoped to resettle in the United States, but months later they received a document informing them that their case lacked credibility and they could not be admitted — though they could appeal. Since then, they have begun the asylum process in Guatemala.
Felipe is constantly looking for work. His daughter did not attend school in 2025. This year, with the help of other Nicaraguans, she enrolled in a private school in their neighborhood on the outskirts of Mixco. “The torture is ongoing. We didn’t want to stay here. We’ve started another process to see if we’ll be admitted to Canada,” he says.
Most Nicaraguan exiles try to hold on to their culinary traditions and do their shopping in a Nicaraguan neighborhood located in Zone 1 of the capital. Others have decorated their makeshift homes with their country’s flag, as did Felipe’s family in Mixco.
For the Nicaraguan Regime, Waving the Wrong Flag Can Be A Subversive Act
Since his arrival in Guatemala in September 2024, René has been unable to find steady work and supports his wife and two children as a construction laborer or auto mechanic. He has begun the asylum process in Guatemala and is looking for someone to help him travel to Spain to apply there.
René, like his father Joaquín, was accused of cybercrimes and public disturbances. Now they are living with the consequences of the deportation that U.S. authorities touted as a success.
“There are days when we don’t eat because we don’t have enough money — we have to pay rent, and there are four of us living in this room,” he said. René did not want his family to be photographed because, unlike him, they can still enter Nicaragua, and there are public threats from the dictatorship against exiles’ relatives.
Since 2010, Ramiro has participated in movements opposed to Ortega's reelection. A former member of the Youth Resistance for Nicaraguan Dignity, he was a regular at protests, including in 2018. He was arrested several times for his political activism.
In August 2023, upon returning home, a group from the Council of Citizen Power (CPC) was waiting for him. This group reports to the dictatorship on individuals linked to the opposition. He was imprisoned from August 2023 to September 2024.
Guatemala City and its outskirts have become a refuge for hundreds of Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence in Honduras, as well as the dictatorships of Ortega in Nicaragua and Bukele in El Salvador. In 2025, the Guatemalan Institute of Migration received 1,370 asylum and refugee applications and granted refugee status to 146 people who had applied years earlier, in a process that typically takes two years.
On the day of their expulsion, agents at La Modelo hurled insults at the political prisoners: “exiles, traitors, stateless.” That same day, before they were expelled, they were given passports valid for ten years. Days later, the regime-controlled Supreme Court of Justice stripped the group of 135 political prisoners of their nationality.
The Nicaraguan dictatorship took everything from Camilo. Police harassment at his workplace and against those who hired him led to his firing. Next, he lost his small business. Then, he was arrested. Last, exiled and stateless, accused by the dictatorship of terrorism and forging government documents for his participation in the 2018 protests against Ortega and his activism on social media.
His family now lives in a shelter run by a religious organization. He found work as a security guard, earning 3,000 quetzales a month ($393) to support his entire family. The dictatorship accused him of selling and distributing child pornography online.
While in Guatemala, he learned that his resettlement in the United States had been denied following the change in U.S. administrations. Now, like the exiles who remain in Guatemala, he is trying to travel elsewhere to file for asylum.
He fears for the family he left behind. “I have a daughter in Nicaragua. Whenever she requests an official document, the system shows that she is the daughter of a stateless person,” he said. “My children here in Guatemala don’t have access to an education. This is no way to live.”
Carlos was first arrested during the 2018 protests and spent ten months in the Jorge Navarro prison in Tipitapa. In December 2022, Carlos destroyed a Sandinista Party statue in Managua, unaware that a surveillance camera was recording him. Weeks later, in January 2023, he was arrested. He was not allowed to receive packages or visitors.
Since his arrest, he has not seen his mother or his two children, as he cannot pay for their trip to Guatemala. To receive public healthcare for his broken leg, he used the ID of a Guatemalan friend.
In 2025, the State Department reported that at least 450 Nicaraguans had been stripped of citizenship. Dozens were resettled in the United States. Others secured the funds to fly to Spain and apply for asylum. One group remained in Guatemala.