How Nicaragua facilitates irregular migration to the US

Extra-regional migration routes that include air travel to Nicaragua and then integrate into irregular flows toward the Mexico-US border represent a problem for Washington.

Manuel Orozco, a migration expert at The Inter-American Dialogue, was reported by daily El País as saying that the think tank tracked 1,150 charter flights landing in Managua from May 2023 to May 2024 that were allegedly carrying irregular migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Tajikistan, India and other countries.

“There is the assumption that they join the irregular migration flows that characterize northern Central America,” Eduardo Núñez, a political analyst based in Guatemala, told BNamericas.

“The magnitude of the problem is not known, given the control that the [Daniel] Ortega regime in Nicaragua has on information, but there is indeed a concern and an alert from the perspective of the US-American agencies.”

Núñez said Nicaragua’s approach could lead to more US sanctions, but since “there are no conditions for [bilateral] cooperation that can take care of the structural causes of migration,” Washington can do little to solve the problem in its favor.

Óscar Chacón, the head of Alianza Américas, a network of 58 organizations that take care of migrants in 19 US states, told BNamericas that entry via Nicaragua could be facilitated by the fraught relations between both countries and lax immigration laws in the latter.

“In other countries like El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, there are more restrictions that have been boosted by US migration policy,” he said. “Many Latin American countries are an appendix of the migration control policy of the United States, and that does not happen in Nicaragua as they have a confrontational attitude toward the US.”

In a blog post in January, Orozco wrote that President Daniel Ortega’s “family clan identified these nationalities and took advantage of the economic and political opportunity to ‘weaponize’ migration as a foreign policy against the United States and increased the weight of the humanitarian crisis.”

According to figures by the US Department of Homeland Security, quoted by Reuters, 188,000 migrants from outside the Americas have crossed into the US illegally via the southern border in fiscal year 2023, compared to 20,000 a decade ago, accounting for 9% of irregular crossings, up from 1%. 

In November, the US imposed visa restrictions on individuals running charter flights targeting irregular migrants in Nicaragua. 

“In a growing trend, charter flight companies have been offering flights – and charging extortion-level prices – that put migrants onto a dangerous overland path north to the US border,” a release by the Department of State said.