Father of three fights return to native Nicaragua, says Minnesota keeping him safe

An Eagan man is fighting to keep his asylum case alive after he narrowly avoided being sent back to Nicaragua, where he fears retaliation and violence from the Sandinista government he once challenged.

Lester, his wife, Dayana, and their two oldest children came to the United States in 2022 to escape the government of autocratic President Daniel Ortega. Dayana says Lester was jailed by the Sandinistas after he worked with groups opposing Ortega’s re-election in 2021, a contest international observers regarded as a sham.

The Minnesota Star Tribune is only using the family members’ first names because they fear reprisal.

Lester has been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since June 25. His case underscores the stakes of the Trump administration’s push for mass deportations for people with credible claims of asylum, fears for their safety, and a lack of any documented history of violence.

Minnesota detentions have doubled under the Trump administration. Many of those detained, like Lester, do not have a criminal record beyond traffic tickets.

After sitting in jail for weeks, Lester said he became despondent and agreed to voluntarily leave the country, thinking he could hide out with family in Nicaragua and eventually return to pursue his asylum claim. When he realized he would likely be turned over to the Sandinista government and face prison or worse, he said, he filed a last-minute appeal of his voluntary departure decision.

But Lester called Dayana early on Aug. 28 to say he was being sent back to Nicaragua despite his appeal. That set off a scramble involving a concerned neighbor and a U.S. Senate staffer to keep him in the United States.

Before his detention, Lester and Dayana said they struggled to find an attorney, but they’d gotten work permits and their case was slowly progressing.

“We’ve tried to do everything right,” Dayana said in Spanish as she bounced Sebastian, their 8-month-old, on her lap during a recent interview. “At the end of the day, it hasn’t been worth anything.”

Lester and his teenage daughter Maria had just returned from dropping Sebastian off at day care June 25 when three vehicles boxed in his work truck at their apartment complex parking lot.

Maria says masked men she believed to be ICE agents emerged from the unmarked cars and questioned her father as she sat in the passenger seat. Lester was still in his pajamas when they took him away in one of their vehicles.

“They told me to go home, that they only needed my dad,” said Maria, who recently observed her 16th birthday without him. “They asked me how I liked living in the U.S.”

Immigration court records that might shed light on ICE’s reasons are not publicly available like typical criminal and civil court documents. The Department of Homeland Security seldom comments on immigration cases, and officials have not responded to questions about Lester’s detention.

The morning Lester was detained, neighbor Christina Ferris-Peck said she was “outraged” to learn from a social media post that someone had been taken by ICE in front of her apartment building. She contacted the property manager to try to figure out who it was.

A few days later, Ferris-Peck connected with Dayana, who happened to live just down the hall. One of the first messages Dayana sent read, “I feel desperate and alone,” Ferris-Peck recalled. “It broke my heart.”

Ferris-Peck reached out to a loose-knit group she was part of called We Party that’s composed of liberal-leaning people across the metro area who want to have an impact beyond protests.

The group helped raise money for Lester’s case and connected Ferris-Peck with fellow We Party member Erica Bell, a Minneapolis resident who speaks Spanish, who could help with legal paperwork and the search for an attorney.

Dayana couldn’t afford the $9,000 retainer an attorney wanted to take their case, and she has struggled to find help from the few nonprofits that work on immigration cases for free.

Meanwhile, Lester was struggling in detention. “Each day he feels more separated from his family,” Dayana said.

Lester felt like he was running out of options and became convinced the only solution was to agree to “voluntary departure,” Bell said. He believed he could return to this country and his family and continue to pursue his asylum request.

Lester paid the $750 fee for Homeland Security to send him back to Nicaragua without a strike on his record. He was sent to a corrections facility in Mississippi and then to Louisiana to await his deportation.

But Bell says she then learned from an attorney that voluntarily leaving probably wouldn’t help Lester in the long run. In fact, he would likely be delivered to the Sandinista government and imprisoned upon his return.

By early August, Dayana was increasingly worried she also could be detained, so she made the “very difficult decision” to start filling out forms to assign her parental rights to Ferris-Peck.

“I’m afraid to go to work, to go to Walmart,” Dayana said. “I don’t want my children separated.”

Dayana, Bell and Ferris-Peck say they believe Lester was “misled and under duress” when he agreed to be voluntarily deported. They started reaching out to representatives in Congress for help.

They learned Aug. 20 that they had only two days left to file an appeal. They were able to pay the $1,010 fee and file the paperwork in time.

It took an emergency “congressional inquiry” from U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s staff to get Homeland Security to acknowledge the last-minute request, Bell and Ferris-Peck said. Klobuchar’s office declined to comment on details of the situation.

Dayana is increasingly worried about Lester and the conditions at the facilities where he is being held. But she’s glad Homeland Security recognized his appeal and didn’t send him to Nicaragua.