Felix Maradiaga spent nearly two years in a Nicaraguan prison cell, including 84 days in solitary confinement where he says he was officially disappeared, before Daniel Ortega's government released him and 221 other political prisoners and flew them to the United States. He thought the ordeal was over. Instead, he learned shortly after landing that Nicaragua had stripped him of his citizenship entirely, leaving the former presidential candidate stateless in a country with no clear system for people in his position.
Maradiaga, now a professor at the University of Virginia, was arrested in June 2021 and endured severe beatings during his imprisonment, according to an account he gave to PBS NewsHour. He described the start of his captivity bluntly: “the first 84 days. I was officially disappeared.” The Ortega government released him along with 221 others on February 9, 2023, according to the same account, and the group was sent to Washington, D.C.
The mass release made headlines at the time. BBC News reported that Nicaragua released 222 of the 245 opposition prisoners it had been holding, and that Maradiaga learned he had been stripped of his citizenship shortly after arriving in the US. Among those released alongside him was Juan Sebastián Chamorro, another former presidential candidate turned political prisoner.
A Parallel Ordeal for Chamorro
Chamorro's path to that same flight began on the night of June 8, 2021, when he says dozens of police officers stormed his home. “Dozens of police officers stormed my home, arbitrarily arrested me, and took me to prison,” he recounted, according to a statement carried by jrsusa.org. He says he was held incommunicado for months before being sentenced the following year to 13 years in prison for what authorities called crimes against the homeland.
Nicaragua expelled Chamorro and stripped him of his nationality in February 2023, according to an account published by kellogg.nd.edu. He has since received a U.S. green card through a U.S.-born child and experienced more than eight months of harassment tied to his case. The Ortega government made the mass citizenship strippings possible by amending Article 21 of the constitution so that anyone declared a traitor to the homeland automatically loses Nicaraguan citizenship, according to constitutionnet.org.
A Wider Crackdown Beyond Two Prominent Cases
The treatment of Maradiaga and Chamorro reflects a broader pattern. The Ortega government has shut down more than 2,000 nongovernmental organizations and at least 50 media outlets, per the same PBS NewsHour interview, and has expelled other real or perceived critics, including human-rights defenders, grassroots organizers and religious figures, according to ishr.ch. Independent media inside Nicaragua have faced censorship, intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrests and death threats since Ortega's 2021 reelection, rsf.org reports, and the outlet notes that national police stormed the newsroom of the daily paper La Prensa without a warrant that year — the paper has not produced a print edition since.
Estimates of how many Nicaraguans have fled the country vary by source. Constitutionnet.org has cited more than 700,000 departures since the 2018 sociopolitical crisis, while Chamorro himself has put the figure at nearly 800,000 people, or about 13% of the population, leaving between 2019 and 2024, according to jrsusa.org. Nicaragua's 2020 cybercrime law added harsher penalties for spreading information the government labels false on social media, including for Nicaraguans living abroad, per rsf.org.
Original Reporting Details Wider Immigration Limbo
According to the Miami Herald, the fallout from Nicaragua's citizenship strippings extends well beyond the 222 prisoners flown to Washington. The paper's reporting describes additional cases, including that of Geraldine Jarquín, a 51-year-old political asylum seeker who says she faced years of persecution and threats of violence in Nicaragua and fled after attending a Zoom meeting on June 8, 2021, the same day Nicaraguan police arrived at the home of another participant in that call. The Herald's account also covers Lenin Salablanca, who was involved in the 2018 protests and imprisoned for nearly 10 months, and journalist Luis Galeano, who has lived in the U.S. since 2018 and was arrested by U.S. immigration authorities in Florida.
The Herald's reporting further describes Nicaraguan-American immigration attorney and Doral vice mayor Maureen Porras helping former political prisoners understand their legal options and complete work-permit paperwork, and quotes Samantha Sitterly, an immigration attorney and legal services director for United Stateless, describing the predicament facing people like Jarquín and Galeano. Harold Rocha, president of the Nicaraguan American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is also cited in that reporting. Hoodline has not independently verified the Herald's specific claims about individual asylum timelines, work authorization status or detention risk described in that story.
Systemic Roots of the Crackdown
The current wave of statelessness traces back to Nicaragua's intensified crackdown on dissent following the 2018 protests, which left more than 300 people dead, according to background compiled from the case histories of Maradiaga and Chamorro. In the years since, the government has repeatedly moved to strip nationality from opponents who fled the country, leaving many exiled Nicaraguans without birth certificates or valid passports as they navigate asylum proceedings in the United States. For people like Maradiaga, who built his political career running for the Nicaraguan presidency before his arrest, that means starting over in a legal system with no clear playbook for someone whose home country has erased his citizenship on paper.
