People From Senegal Are Using Nicaragua As A Gateway To The U.S.

Weaponizing Migration Nicaragua In Senegal, Haiti, India, China, and Libya, the hot new ticket is Nicaragua. Famed for its beaches, volcanos and rainforests, citizens of dozens of countries are attracted by a different lure: It’s become a major gateway to the United States. “In Senegal, it’s all over the streets – everyone’s talking about Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Nicaragua,” Gueva Ba, 40, of the capital Dakar, told the Associated Press. Ba paid about $10,000 to get to Nicaragua in July 2023, where he then made his way to the US border with Mexico. After crossing it, he was caught, detained and deported a few months later, along with 131 other Senegalese who had also tried their luck. Ba, like many of the tens of thousands of migrants now trying to use this route, had already tried to make it to Europe 11 times by boat from Morocco across the Mediterranean. But with Nicaragua, he knew he had a special advantage; not only did he not need a visa to land there, but more importantly, Nicaragua is actively encouraging such migration as a way to punish the US for sanctions against the repressive regime of President Daniel Ortega, in power for 28 of the past 45 years, say US officials. “The Ortega government knows they have few important policy tools at hand to confront the United States … so they have armed migration as a way to attack,” said Manuel Orozco, director of the migration at the Inter-American Dialogue, in an interview with NPR. “This is definitely a concrete example of weaponizing migration as a foreign policy.” Beyond a tit-for-tat for sanctions, Nicaragua’s government, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), is making millions of dollars with its business of human trafficking, imposing arbitrary entry fees on the migrant arrivals that can be as much as $200 per person, as well as thousands of dollars in landing and departure fees imposed on the charters, wrote El País. And those prices are going up – arrivals from Africa now will be charged more than $1,100 to land in Nicaragua. US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols said he was “concerned” about the “dramatic” increase in flights to Nicaragua to promote migration. “No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants – not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments,” he wrote on X. The US slapped new sanctions on Nicaragua in May over the migration issue. The numbers tell the story. Between May 2023 and May 2024, more than 1,000 flights with migrants from countries such as Libya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, India, and Tajikistan landed in the Nicaraguan capital Managua, while in a six-month period between June to November 2023, about 500 flights, mostly from Haiti and Cuba, landed there, according to the Inter-American Dialogue. At the same time, while arrests for illegal crossings on the US-Mexico border topped 6.4 million between January 2021 and January 2024 (before falling steeply later in 2024), Mexicans accounted for only about one-quarter of those arrested, the rest coming from more than 100 countries, wrote the think tank. From July to December 2023 there were more than 20,200 arrests of just Senegalese migrants for crossing the border illegally, 10 times the figure for arrests in the same period in 2022. “Migration flows to the United States have more than doubled to over eight million people annually from 2020 and 2023,” the organization wrote, adding that Nicaragua is responsible for at least 10 percent of all migration that has arrived at the Mexico-US border. The charters first began in 2021, when the Nicaraguan government opened the doors of the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport, relaxed visa requirements for African nationals and welcomed the first migrant arrivals from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Curacao, and Haiti. Today, passengers now fly from countries in South America, North Africa and Central Asia, to the country on their way to the US to avoid the dangerous crossing at the Darien Gap at the Colombian-Panamanian border, the World wrote. The Senegalese and others became part of a surge in migration at the southern border, made up for the first time of people from countries such as Mauritania, Ghana, Tajikistan and Bangladesh, who usually head towards Europe. They were able to coordinate the trip because of travel agents, smugglers and the information that comes from social media and apps like WhatsApp, and pay for the trip with electronic payments. Meanwhile, Nicaragua itself has been increasingly contributing to the flows headed toward the US border over the past few years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. It has deported hundreds of its own nationals, while the deepening repression in the country has led to thousands more deciding to head north. “Nicaragua is caught in a spiral of violence marked by the persecution of all forms of political opposition, whether real or perceived, both domestically and abroad,” said Jan Simon, the chair of a United Nations human rights group that accused the Nicaraguan regime led by Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, of “crimes against humanity.” A former police special forces officer, going only by the name Edwin, was ordered to shoot protesters during mass anti-government demonstrations in 2018. Instead, he fled, before being captured, imprisoned, raped, and severely tortured. These days, he lives in exile in Costa Rica, making ends meet with odd jobs while waiting for asylum in the US. He worries about Nicaraguan officials finding him. “There were moments of desperation when I thought: ‘It would have been better if I stayed … killed all those people,” he told the Washington Post. “But I didn’t go into the police to kill people.” Share this story