Nicaraguan journalist Galeano held at Krome, court date October 2

Detention came day before House hearing on Nicaraguan regime

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained veteran Nicaraguan journalist Luis Galeano in Florida on Monday, pulling him over shortly after he began his second job driving Lyft, according to his wife, Daykel Santamaría. As of Wednesday, Galeano was held at Krome detention center in Miami. He has an immigration court date scheduled for 2 October, Santamaría said.

Galeano fled Nicaragua in December, 2018, days after police raided 100% Noticias, the outlet where he worked, and issued an order for his arrest, Santamaría told the Guardian. He arrived in Miami shortly thereafter and petitioned for asylum.

Records of targeting tied to his reporting date at least as far back as 23 February 2011, when Amnesty International issued an “Urgent Action” bulletin warning that his life was in danger. The bulletin said an unknown individual had called Galeano on his mobile phone and said: “You have 72 hours to change your mind about what you’ll publish, otherwise your family won’t see you anymore.” The caller referred to Galeano’s reporting for El Nuevo Diario on government misuse of around $20m between 2004 and 2008.

Since arriving in the US in 2018, Galeano has continued critically reporting on the Sandinista government online through his platform, Café con voz. He is one of at least 94 Nicaraguans whom the Ortega Murillo regime has stripped of citizenship in recent years for opposing the government, according to the Guardian. The denaturalization order also affected acclaimed novelist Sergio Ramírez and poet and writer Gioconda Belli.

Galeano’s asylum application has been pending for about seven years, and he holds both a work permit and a social security number, Santamaría said. She said she did not know whether her husband was, in effect, a man without a country as a result of Nicaragua’s 2023 measure stripping him of citizenship.

“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 is now a US citizen living in Washington, DC.

Melendez called the situation facing his friend “a double trauma – he escaped from his country because of his work and then the place where he sought refuge detains him due to their domestic politics.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists and the Inter American Press Association called for Galeano’s release.

On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a two-hour-plus hearing titled “Confronting the Totalitarian Ortega-Murillo Regime.” Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar, the committee chairperson, opened the hearing by denouncing how Daniel Ortega and Rosa Murillo “have spent years dismantling democracy,” and warned that “the Administration is paying attention, and Ortega and Murillo should consider themselves warned.”

The disjunction between the US government detaining a journalist whom the Nicaraguan government had targeted for reporting on its totalitarian tendencies while at the same time denouncing the Nicaraguan government is an example of “the serious and profound contradictions” in the Trump administration’s approach to Nicaragua, said Ana María Méndez Dardón, Central America director at the Washington Office on Latin America. Galeano’s detention is one of many examples of “how due process is missing from the right to asylum” under the Trump administration, she added.

After Galeano’s detention, Salazar issued a statement saying: “America must always know the difference between a criminal and a political exile.” Salazar’s Republican colleague from Florida, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, posted a statement on X saying: “The United States has long been a beacon of freedom for those persecuted by tyranny. We must uphold that tradition…” Queries from the Guardian to the committee and several of its members were not answered.

ICE has been contacted for comment.

In the days before his detention, Galeano had been seeing ICE agents on the streets of Miami with increasing alarm while driving Lyft, said Melendez, who founded Expediente Abierto, a think tank on Central America. “He called me like a week ago, asking if I could help with a new journalism project he had in mind, a morning news program on the region [of Latin America],” Melendez said. “He wanted to get off the streets, seeing the raids everywhere.”

Santamaría said the two had spoken often about what would happen if one or the other was detained. Plans included calling their lawyer, alerting the media, and trying to stay calm. “We prepared ourselves mentally for this moment,” she said. “We’ve already lived through going into exile, having an order of arrest – these are situations that make you more mature.”

Galeano spoke with his wife several times on Wednesday. She described him as calm, telling her, “If God got me out of Nicaragua, he’ll get me out of here.” She said she has faith the US government will see what she called “a very well-documented asylum case.”