Exiled Nicaraguan journalist Luis Galeano detained by ICE in Florida

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.

“Deporting [Galeano] to Nicaragua would be a death sentence,” said Javier Melendez, a sociologist who has been friends with the journalist for more than 30 years. 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.

This is NOT a direct response to TheDon’s post, it’s just an observation.

From the article: “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.”

It seems like Due Process is exactly what Galeano is getting right now. Otherwise, he’d be on a plane headed home or someplace else.

Is he a “US citizen,” or someone with a “work permit?”

The story says he’s both.

I will say Nicaragua is a terrible place. I know of two people who fled that country, one getting refugee status, then citizenship, in Europe. The other made it back to his country. It is a bizarre story.

In Nicaragua, any assertion of illegality anyone dreams up will get you thrown in prison. You are guilty until you prove your innocence, there, and you don’t get a real chance to prove your innocence.

The first had his wife make up a terrible claim, because she wanted his out-of-the-country family to give her/them and the kid a bunch of money she dreamed up his family had, somewhere—but he’d be in prison for life, there. (Yeah, walk that thinking through.) He escaped the house after she called and went to an attorney that evening, who said he had to get out of the country before they contacted the Nicaraguan border patrol. He had become a citizen there and she was the citizen he’d married.

Irony moment: Years later, a relative of hers got mad at her and made up a lie about her to tell the police. That led to her fleeing her own country, with her child, as the exact same thing she did to her now divorced husband now happened to her.

Strangely, those two have, long-distance, largely reconciled. The crazy wife admitted she had lied and asked for forgiveness, which he gave her. He now visits Europe to catch up with her and their daughter.

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