A former Nicaraguan paramilitary faces deportation or statelessness after ICE detention

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A former Nicaraguan paramilitary detained by U.S. immigration authorities could soon be deported to the country where he said he was imprisoned and tortured — or sent to another country where he would be rendered stateless.

Marlon Gerardo Sáenz Cruz, 65, who defected from the ruling Sandinista party, was among 222 prisoners stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship and brought to D.C. through a U.S. State Department initiative in February 2023. Now, after being detained during his check-in with immigration authorities in Los Angeles on Aug. 17, he must make his case before an immigration judge to remain in the U.S.

His immigration court date on Sept. 8 comes as asylum denial rates have spiked under the Trump administration and as people granted lesser protections from deportation are increasingly being sent to third countries in Latin America and Africa where they have no ties.

“Even if he manages to get protection from a U.S. immigration judge, it’s not ensured safety,” said Savi Arvey, director of policy, refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First.

Sáenz's detention followed a letter sent to the U.S. State Department last year by a group of Nicaraguan exiles, mainly in Miami. They allege that he and dozens of other former government officials maintain their ties to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo.

The exiles also accused Sáenz of harassing other government opponents while in the U.S. A legal representative for Sáenz said he was simply responding to attacks against him.

“We are asking the State Department to investigate all these people because it’s unacceptable that they are washing the blood off their hands and covering up the actions of a criminal who shouldn’t be in the United States and who is a threat to national security,” said Aida Carrion-Vanegas, president of the advocacy organization Nicaraguan Americans United for the Republic.

In October 2025, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau responded to Carrion-Vanegas on X, saying he would look into the allegations. She has not heard from him since. The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Sáenz’s potential deportation to Nicaragua would send a message that “discourages future defections and reinforces the regime’s narrative that there is no safe exit,” said accredited court representative Muriel Sáenz, who has been assisting with his asylum application and is not related to him.

Sáenz, known in Nicaragua as El Chino Enoc, became a guerrilla fighter as a teenager in the 1970s and remained close to high-level Sandinista figures for decades. He later spoke to Nicaraguan press about his involvement in a government-aligned paramilitary group that repressed protesters following mass anti-government marches demanding Ortega’s resignation in 2018. Hundreds were killed.

Ortega has claimed the 2018 protests were a U.S.-backed coup to overthrow him and that those imprisoned were involved in the plot.

Sáenz's accredited representative denied that he had killed anyone or committed any crime in Nicaragua.

Sáenz broke with the government in 2019, and began using his popular YouTube channel to denounce corruption within the Ortega-Murillo government, which has maintained its grip on power for nearly two decades while stifling dissent through the imprisonment and torture of opponents.

He was imprisoned in Nicaragua in May 2022 on drug and weapons trafficking charges that he has called politically motivated.

He now has a leg ulcer, glaucoma and other health issues, some stemming from being tortured and held in solitary confinement, according to Muriel Sáenz, who said she fears for his health. She said complications from having polio as a child have worsened in ICE detention and he now uses a wheelchair.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment, but its online locator shows Sáenz is being held at Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

Sáenz’s immigration case presents a legal dilemma because an immigration judge will have to weigh his alleged involvement in human rights abuses against the principle of not sending someone to danger, explained Heather Hogan, a lawyer and policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyer Association.

Sáenz and the other Nicaraguan prisoners entered the U.S. on humanitarian parole, a temporary status granted in emergencies that does not guarantee a pathway to citizenship. He then opened an asylum case within a year of entering the country as required.

Under U.S. immigration law, perpetrators of human rights abuses, including torture, enforced disappearances or extrajudicial killings, are barred from receiving asylum, and a judge would have to determine if Sáenz's past involvement with the Sandinista government makes him ineligible.

But a judge could also grant Sáenz deportation deferral under the Convention Against Torture, CAT, an international human rights treaty that the U.S. is party to, if he is found likely to face torture in Nicaragua.

That protection would prevent Sáenz from being deported to Nicaragua, but would not grant him permanent immigration status or prevent the U.S. from sending him to a third country, as has become common under the Trump administration.

“In some cases like this, people do get granted deferral,” said Hogan, who previously decided cases of people implicated in possible human rights abuses as an asylum officer for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“Because our analysis is more about following our laws and international obligations … not carrying out a trial and imposing a punishment for their past actions.”

But the Trump administration has broken with the precedent of allowing people with CAT protections to remain in the U.S., instead sending them to third countries, said Arvey of Human Rights First.

“It’s a bleak situation because never before has this population been targeted in this way,” she said.

Nicaraguan exiles are split on how Saénz's case should be handled.

Miguel Mora, a former prisoner who arrived in the U.S. in the same group as Sáenz and also has a pending asylum case, said Sáenz’s involvement in the 2018 repression made the case “complicated,” but he said “it corresponds exclusively to U.S. authorities to determine, based on the law and the evidence in the case, if he does or does not have the right to asylum.”

Danny Ramírez-Ayérdiz, a Nicaraguan lawyer and founder of the Interamerican Center for Legal Assistance in Human Rights that investigates abuses of the Ortega-Murillo government, said that Sáenz should be held accountable for his alleged crimes — but only after a political transition in Nicaragua, when he could be extradited there to face justice.

“But if they send him to Nicaragua now, he’s at a risk of dying,” Ramírez-Ayérdiz said. “Just like other former Sandinistas, the government would be particularly cruel with him.”

Manuel Prado, vice president of the Miskitu American Organization, which advocates for the rights of Nicaraguan Indigenous groups, said the outcome of Sáenz’s case will send a message about how Nicaragua will move forward “to heal the nation.”

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