U.S. immigration authorities arrested a Nicaraguan journalist on Monday who is critical of the government of Daniel Ortega and has been living in exile in the United States for several years, according to the opposition figure’s family. Luis Galeano went into exile in the United States in 2018 and was awaiting a decision on his asylum application when agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detained him.
After leaving Nicaragua, he continued working as a journalist from abroad. Galeano’s wife, Deykel Santamaria, said on Monday that she had a brief telephone conversation with her husband, 48, who was arrested while working as a rideshare driver in Florida. His detention comes as the Trump administration has tightened U.S. policy on irregular migration while also adopting increasingly strong rhetoric against Nicaragua’s government.
“The United States must always know how to distinguish between a criminal and a political exile,” Republican lawmaker Maria Elvira Salazar, an ally of President Donald Trump, said. Amid concerns that Galeano could be deported to Nicaragua, Salazar said the journalist could not “end up in the hands of the dictatorship that persecuted him.”
Luis Galeano is among a group of 94 opposition figures who were stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship by the Ortega government in February 2023 after being accused of being “traitors to the homeland.” Spain later granted Galeano Spanish citizenship, according to his family.
Daniel Ortega, an 80-year-old former Marxist guerrilla, and his wife Rosario Murillo, five years his junior, exercise near-total control over the Central American country. Ortega’s grip on Nicaragua tightened further after the 2018 protests, whose repression left around 300 people dead, according to the United Nations, forced nearly one million Nicaraguans into exile and dealt a severe blow to the country’s independent press.
In early September, Washington urged the international community to halt dealings with Managua, denouncing what it called a “brutal dictatorship” following the adoption…
