‘We live with the same fear as we did in Nicaragua’: migrants caught between Trump’s deportations and the Ortega regime

Every morning, when Fernando leaves his house for his job as a cook at a Bayside restaurant in downtown Miami, he checks several times to see if his printed asylum application papers are in his backpack. Faced with increasingly frequent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, deployed as part of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade, these documents are his only shield to claim legal status in the United States. Since May 2025, Fernando and his partner have fallen into a legal limbo: the work permit granted to them by humanitarian parole has expired, as did parole itself for this Nicaraguan couple.

“Walking on the streets is difficult because you look at a police officer and you get scared. It’s scary that they’ll catch you just because you have a dark, Latino face… then ICE tells you: ‘You’re coming with us,’” Fernando, a fictitious name, tells EL PAÍS on condition of anonymity. This migrant has two fears: first, that the United States government will track him down for making these statements and deport him; and second, that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo will identify him and confiscate his properties in Nicaragua, a country he fled because he opposed the co-presidential couple.

“We live with the same fear we had in Nicaragua,” says Lucy, Fernando’s partner. “We’re in a different country, but the fear is the same: that one day we won’t return home and they’ll take us, like they did there, to prison… or here, to a detention center.”

Fernando and Lucy worked at a bank in Nicaragua and always ruled out irregular migration to the United States through Mexico due to the dangers involved. Since 2018, the year of the social protests, they endured constant harassment from the police and Sandinista paramilitaries. This was until 2022, when they applied for a temporary humanitarian parole, a path opened up by the Biden administration. They were accepted and arrived in Miami in June 2023, where a month later their lives took a new turn with the arrival of their baby girl in July.

To support his family, Fernando did all kinds of jobs. He carried tiles and loaded debris for remodeling projects, he worked for flooring companies, he was a construction assistant and drove long distances in a van without being paid for fuel or overtime. He even took jobs where he was never paid at all. After several months of abuse, he found some stability in the kitchen of a tourist restaurant overlooking Biscayne Bay.

However, just as things were beginning to stabilize for these Nicaraguans, their parole and work permits expired. They thought they were safe: before their status expired, they began the process of applying for political asylum. They had always feared Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Seeing the Republican return to the White House was, in their words, “like a bucket of cold water.” But the real blow to their peace of mind came later, when the president ordered an indefinite freeze on asylum applications from migrants who entered the United States under the parole program.

“The anxiety is constant. There’s fear at work. We’re on guard on the streets. We’ve even considered moving to Switzerland, where I have a sister. But what’s holding us back most in the United States is our daughter. We’re here for her. Because there’s no future in Nicaragua. The basic food basket costs more than what we earned. We couldn’t support her there... and here the girl will be able to access an education that we couldn’t provide her in Nicaragua,” the couple reflects in unison while the little girl plays at a ceviche restaurant in Miami, near Bayside, where they meet with EL PAÍS.

The daily limbo

Fernando complains about a limbo that “gets bigger every day,” especially after one of the latest news stories they saw on CNN at the end of June. That is, that Trump plans to take new action that would directly affect asylum seekers already in the country, who could face express deportation without even the right to a hearing. According to the U.S. media network, the Republican administration plans to deny the asylum applications of hundreds of thousands of people. Those affected would be migrants who entered illegally and then requested protection. Although technically the couple entered legally, under the parole program, Trump has insisted on describing this mechanism as an illegality created by his predecessor.

“We don’t know anything anymore. They’re not respecting what the judges say either,” says Fernando. The fear of these Nicaraguans is shared by a broader community: 96,000 Nicaraguans who arrived in the United States under the parole program, and whose legal limbo has now also extended to another 4,000 who were living under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). On July 8, the Department of Homeland Security announced the cancellation of TPS for Nicaragua, and since then, the possibility of being deported has tormented them every day.

ICE data indicates that its agents arrested approximately 30,000 immigrants in June—the highest number since Trump returned to power—of whom 18,000 were deported. In the case of Nicaraguans, the State Department reported that since January 2025, Managua has received 22 flights with 2,527 deportees.

“Sorry to repeat this, but we’re very scared,” say Fernando and Lucy. “Leaving home means not knowing if we’ll ever return. Even more so now that they’ve opened that detention center nearby, which looks more like a concentration camp,” they continue, referring to Alligator Alcatraz. “We know that if they catch us, we’re candidates for imprisonment there. We don’t know for how long… But even worse: if they deport us, we could end up in Nicaragua. It’s horrible to live with this anxiety and with the little girl.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition