10-02-2025
U.S. flew 222 political prisoners from Nicaragua to Washington. Now their future is uncertain
Juan Lorenzo Holmann arrived at the Westin hotel near the Washington Dulles International Airport dressed in the same exact clothes he'd been wearing two years earlier when he first walked through the hotel's doors. They were the clothes his jailers had handed him the day he left his Nicaraguan prison cell and boarded a flight out of the country. The shirt and pants fit him much better now than they had that day. Holmann has since regained much of the weight he lost during the 545 days he spent inside El Nuevo Chipote, a prison in Nicaragua's capital infamous as a site of torture.
Dozens of former Nicaraguan political prisoners were waiting to greet Holmann in the hotel's lobby. All of them had been passengers aboard the same flight, the result of a U.S. negotiated prisoner release. On Feb. 9, 2023, Nicaraguan authorities transported 222 dissidents directly from their jails or house arrest to a U.S. government-chartered plane, which flew them to Dulles.
The group was then put up for two days at the nearby Westin hotel, and granted a period of humanitarian parole, allowing them to legally remain in the country for two years. Returning to Nicaragua was not an option. After the plane took off, the Nicaraguan government revoked the citizenship of all the freed prisoners on board.
Holmann, the publisher of Nicaragua's largest newspaper, La Prensa, said his clothes were the only possessions he had left from his life in Nicaragua. 'Even this,' Holmann said, gesturing to what initially appeared to be a red scarf thrown across his shoulder, 'this is the blanket I took from the plane.' All assets and property belonging to the political prisoners were seized by the Nicaraguan government after their expulsion. 'Dressing in this is to remember and protest all the injustices we suffered,' Holmann recalled. The Nicaraguan passport he was given as he boarded the plane is no longer valid – Holmann and the others are citizens of no nation.
On Saturday, 60 of the Nicaraguan exiles returned to the Westin hotel to celebrate the two-year anniversary of their liberation and to mark the last day of their humanitarian parole. But a cloud of uncertainty hung over the reunion. Nametags laid out on the check-in table went uncollected, and seats at the dinner tables sat empty. Many of the 'compañeros de vuelo,' or 'flight comrades,' as some call each other, had decided to stay home, some cancelling their travel plans in just the last few days, fearing they might be detained or deported.
The group's humanitarian parole is expiring three weeks into the new administration of President Donald Trump, who promised to crack down on what he called a national emergency at the southern border and to conduct mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants already in the United States. Now, even these former prisoners, directly freed by the previous U.S. administration, are uncertain about their futures here, highlighting how chaotic and uncertain a time this is for people in the U.S. fleeing persecution.
One year after Holmann began his job as publisher of La Prensa, he was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison for treason, among other charges. On board the plane, he was surprised to see one of the paper's drivers, Carlos Lam, whose job had been to ferry reporters from one location to the next.
Inside the Westin, Lam embraced his old boss and the two laughed over how Lam had received an even harsher sentence than the paper's publisher: five years for treason and another five for publishing 'fake news,' despite Lam having never worked as a journalist.
Reunited friends posed for selfies and laughed, comparing them to photos taken at the hotel two years earlier, when they'd worn the same smiles, but on gaunt, emaciated faces.
U.S. Ambassador Kevin Sullivan took photo after photo with the prisoners' whose release he helped to coordinate in 2023 as then-ambassador to Nicaragua. 'For any of us involved in it, to have such a large, diverse group of people imprisoned and to help them recover their freedom is something we'll always remember,' Sullivan said.
But for some, the intervening years have not been easy. Medardo Mairena, a former dairy farmer who helped organize rural peasants against a planned interoceanic canal project, says he's faced racism and discrimination as he struggles to find a job.
'Work in the countryside was always hard, but this is harder, to try and survive without your culture where no one knows you, where you're humiliated and looked down upon,' he said. Mairena lived with his family in a valley, accessible only by horseback. 'We were happy how we lived, we breathed fresh, uncontaminated air and drank crystal, natural water.' Mairena now lives in Atlanta, where he works washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms and doing construction. He is still separated from his family. 'I didn't ask to be brought here, this isn't my country, but if they want to deport me… Where will I go?'
In the lobby, someone draped in a Nicaraguan flag walked through and shouted, 'Que viva Nicaragua libre!' as everyone responded, 'Que viva!' much to the surprise and confusion of the staff and other airport-hotel-patrons.
Since President Daniel Ortega's government violently repressed a civil uprising in 2018, an estimated 850,000 Nicaraguans have fled the country.
While roughly 225,000 initially went to neighboring Costa Rica, and many still do, hundreds of thousands have also sought to come to the United States. That includes about 96,000 who obtained humanitarian parole under a program former President Joe Biden created to allow pre-vetted immigrants from Nicaragua and several other countries to enter the U.S. with a sponsor.
Trump, however, promised a radical overhaul of the U.S. immigration system. In a series of executive orders and administrative moves, he has effectively frozen the asylum system at the border; paused refugee resettlement; terminated deportation protections for some people already in the United States; and ended humanitarian parole programs for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Nicaraguans who entered the country through the humanitarian parole program but did not apply for asylum are at risk for deportation when their parole ends and that includes at least a few of the compañeros de vuelo. Not everyone began the process for seeking asylum, said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, who declared his intent to run for president ahead of Nicaragua's 2021 elections and quickly became the fourth potential candidate to be arrested.
Some people didn't understand the process, and most didn't go to an immigration lawyer — 'Why? Because it's expensive!' he said, pointing out that when the Nicaraguan government revoked their citizenship, it also seized their property and assets. Some of the 221 Nicaraguans were left completely destitute. One of the former prisoners is a U.S. citizen.
'I'm worried about the ones from our group who don't have asylum cases and now have no protection,' Chamorro added. 'But I'm even more worried about the thousands who came here on humanitarian parole and couldn't afford a lawyer and are now in danger of deportation.'
Of the over 90,000 Nicaraguans in the U.S. on humanitarian parole, only about a third have begun to pursue long-term legal solutions, according to Manuel Orozco, the director of the Migration, Remittances, and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. According to U.S. Census data, as of 2021 Florida was home to over a third of the Nicaraguans living in the U.S., with Miami Dade County having the highest concentration. Miami's immigration court alone has a backlog of over 31,000 Nicaraguan cases.
Trump while campaigning promised that 'on day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.' Unauthorized immigrants without criminal convictions are likely to be swept up in enforcement actions as well; 'less than half of the approximately 8,200 people arrested from Jan. 20 through Feb. 2 so far have criminal convictions,' according to a review of government data by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Experts say it would be legally difficult if not impossible to deport someone with a pending asylum application, like many of the Nicaraguan exiles have. But the Trump administration could — as it did during the first term — limit the criteria under which immigration judges can provide asylum, says Andrew Seele, president of the Migration Policy Institute.
And while this group likely has strong cases, Jordi Amaral, an immigration expert, said the 'harsh reality is a successful asylum case is not just dependent on the facts of the case, but also depends on who the judge is and where the case is behind heard.'
Those who do have asylum cases in the works still worried they could be detained or even deported in the chaos. 'I feel I'm in limbo,' said Lam, the former driver. 'All I have is some paper, not even a court date for my asylum case.'
And yet another detention is difficult to contemplate. 'Our group, these ex-prisoners, are people who were interrogated and tortured for years,' said Felix Maradiaga, who was arrested the same day as fellow candidate Chamorro after declaring his intent to run for president. 'The last thing they want is to be stopped at an airport by ICE and to be thrown back into an interrogation room, they're terrified of it.'
'Incertidumbre,' or uncertainty, was the word on everyone's lips at the reunion.
'A good portion of the 222 were concerned by the arrests happening everywhere… and some lawyers were advising them to avoid travelling,' Chamorro said. 'It shows you the level of anxiety, that after all we have suffered—prison, banishment, elimination of our citizenship, exile, family separation—in addition you add the uncertainty that we came as humanitarian parolees.'
At midnight, those who did attend spent the Cinderella moment together. Their humanitarian parole expired as the bartender tried to put everything away and the eclectic group of friends politely tried to buy each other one more beer and reminisce about the moment when they realized they were really leaving.
One of them had recorded a video from inside the plane as it took off, and a group gathered around the bar to watch it one more time. In it, the rising sun beams in through the windows and moves across the cabin as the plane tilts sideways, turning north. The passengers, who had been prisoners just minutes prior, begin spontaneously shouting out their home towns and departments 'Estelí!' 'Carazo!' 'La Costa Atlántica!' as the 222 jubilantly shout 'que viva!' to each one.
'The memory is a sweet but bitter drink,' Chamorro said, holding a whiskey glass. 'I knew I'd see my wife and daughter again, but I also knew I was looking down at the lake of Managua and the city, that it would be the last time I see them for a long time.'
