The Day the Ortega Dictatorship Tried to Turn Us into “Non-Persons”
February 9, 2026 marks three years since a moment that changed our lives and left a deep wound in Nicaragua’s conscience. That day, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo did not simply expel us from our country. It tried to expel us from the very right to exist as citizens, stripping us of our nationality and attempting to erase—by decree—our belonging to the homeland we love.
For many of us, that date holds two truths at once. Outrage and resolve. Outrage, because no one should taste freedom with exile lodged like a constant ache in the chest. Resolve, because that act revealed something essential. The regime fears an awakened conscience more than any border.
Our freedom has been partial. It cannot be complete while others remain inside Nicaragua under harassment, surveillance, and punishment; while families are targeted simply for their ties; while the dictatorship tries to persecute even memory itself. Three years later, gratitude for being alive lives side by side with the responsibility not to normalize injustice.
In exile, many of us have returned to what is most basic and most sustaining: faith, family, daily gratitude. In my own home, I have learned to hold my daughter Alejandra and my wife Berta with deeper tenderness—as a form of quiet resistance. I have learned to take my mother Carmen’s hand with greater care, to protect what tyranny tries to fracture. The dictatorship believes that by breaking bonds it can break our spirit. It is wrong. A family scattered is not a family defeated. It is a family planted.
The expulsion of the 222 political prisoners became the first major experiment in a method the regime has refined with cold precision: turning sovereignty into a weapon. After us came more expulsions, more denationalizations, confiscations, passport denials, and entry bans. In January 2026, the regime’s controlled legislature pushed a reform that, in practice, undermines the right to dual nationality—striking exiles especially hard. The message is unmistakable. Citizenship is no longer treated as a right, but as a privilege the regime claims it can revoke.
When people reference the Nuremberg Laws, it must be done carefully. Those were a set of laws enacted in Nazi Germany in 1935 that legalized exclusion by stripping Jews and other targeted groups of fundamental rights and reducing them, in the eyes of the state, to something less than full persons. The point is not to equate historical tragedies in scale or context. It is to name a moral pattern: when a state uses law to downgrade a group into “non-persons” and normalizes exclusion as public policy, society must respond before cruelty becomes routine.
Even in that darkness, we also saw something luminous: solidarity. Spain offered citizenship to many of those rendered stateless, opening a door of dignity when the regime tried to close every door.
In my case, I remain stateless. And still, we hold a conviction shared by many Nicaraguans in exile: Nicaragua cannot be rebuilt only from afar. That is why, in every conversation with democratic governments, diplomats, and allies, I insist on a simple principle. The regime must allow the voluntary return of those who wish to go home. Personally, I continue working toward the day when I can return to Nicaragua—alongside other Nicaraguans who also long to return—when conditions allow it, and when returning can be done responsibly, with a commitment to build peace with freedom.
What happened to the 222? Many have rebuilt their lives with courage. Some continue public advocacy. Others have chosen silence. Often, that silence is not indifference. It is protection. The dictatorship practices transnational repression—harassing families, threatening loved ones, monitoring, intimidating. Under a dictatorship, anonymity can be a way to survive.
And today we carry a fresh pain that deserves clear moral urgency. We feel deep outrage and concern for Nicaraguans living in immigration uncertainty, including those who have been deported, and for those still inside Nicaragua—where the country itself can feel like one large prison. None of this should be normal. None of it should be accepted as fate.
Three years later, we have not lost hope. But hope under dictatorship is not naïve optimism. It is faith—and it is also a strategy of resistance. It is looking straight at suffering without surrendering. It is refusing to hate, without abandoning justice.
A dictatorship can expel us from the physical territory of Nicaragua for a time, but it cannot expel us from Nicaragua itself. Nicaragua is not a stamp in a registry. It is a living covenant of love among its people. And no abusive decree can cancel that. Nicaragua lives in our voices, our faith, our memory, and in our determination to return—not to destroy, but to rebuild a democratic future grounded in dignity, truth, and freedom.