At least 838,363 Nicaraguans — close to 13% of the population — left the country between April 2018 and December 2024, according to figures published this month by the Nicaragua Nunca Más (Never Again) Collective, a rights group that has documented the consequences of nearly eight years of crackdown under President Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice-President Rosario Murillo.

The scale of the exodus, the Collective argued in a statement marking World Refugee Day on June 20, reflects a forced displacement rooted in the closure of civic space, the imprisonment of dissidents and the unravelling of due process, Infobae reported. Behind the aggregate figures, it said, lie separated families, threatened journalists and human rights defenders, students forced abroad mid-degree, and peasant leaders who have had to rebuild their lives in exile.

Costa Rica has borne the brunt of the outflow. Citing UNHCR data as of October 2025, the Collective said San José had granted international protection to 207,456 people, 85% of them Nicaraguan, while Nicaraguan nationals had lodged a further 16,500 asylum applications, enough to make the country the chief destination for a diaspora the group says was manufactured by state persecution rather than chosen.

The findings add to a body of evidence, compiled separately by the United Nations and by the US government, suggesting that the Ortega-Murillo regime’s reach now extends well beyond Nicaragua's borders. A UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua told the Human Rights Council in March that the government had pursued hundreds, possibly thousands, of exiled critics through surveillance and intimidation, with at least a dozen cases resulting in killings or attempted killings. The panel concluded that Ortega, Murillo and senior officials bore responsibility for "serious, systematic and widespread" violations, some amounting to crimes against humanity, and that the campaign was funded in part through the diversion of public money earmarked for social assistance.

One case cited by both the UN investigators and the Collective is that of Roberto Samcam, a retired army major and prominent government critic shot dead at his home in San José in June 2025. UN investigators said the killing carried the hallmarks of a contract murder preceded by surveillance and threats. That conclusion has reinforced concern in Costa Rica, the principal host country, about the safety its own asylum system can guarantee. The Collective also named Jaime Luis Ortega Chavarría and Rodolfo Rojas Cordero among Nicaraguans killed in exile.

That extraterritorial campaign, UN investigators found, has been compounded by a domestic policy of statelessness: since 2023 the government has stripped 452 Nicaraguans of their nationality and left potentially thousands more without valid documents, by declining to renew passports or permitting re-entry. Diplomatic missions, the panel said, have themselves been used as instruments of surveillance over the diaspora.

"Political persecution is financed by the state, executed through its institutions, and extended across borders to ensure that no-one — absolutely no-one — stands in the way of the regime," Jan-Michael Simon, who chairs the UN expert group, told the Human Rights Council in March, according to AFP.

Washington has responded with an escalating sanctions campaign. In February the US Treasury and State Department designated five senior Nicaraguan officials, including labour minister Johana Flores and military intelligence chief Leonel Gutiérrez, accusing them of running the apparatus that allows Ortega and Murillo to "repress their people." The measures followed visa restrictions on the director of La Modelo, Nicaragua's largest and most notorious prison, and form part of a broader US push across the region that has also seen Washington tighten sanctions on Cuba and, in January, detain Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

In April, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio slapped sanctions on Nicaragua's vice minister of the interior Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa for his involvement in serious human rights violations, timing the designation to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the regime's bloody crackdown on protests that killed more than 325 demonstrators in 2018.

The Trump administration, and Biden before it, has never recognised the legitimacy of Ortega and Murillo's November 2021 re-election, held with seven potential challengers in prison, and has pressed Managua for the unconditional release of political detainees.

Nicaragua freed dozens of prisoners in January, though the US Embassy said at the time that more than 60 people remained "unjustly detained or disappeared."

Against that backdrop, the Nunca Más Collective argued that legal recognition of refugee status is not, by itself, sufficient protection for those who have fled. It called for concrete measures on prevention and investigation, faster processing of asylum and regularisation, and guaranteed access to healthcare, education, employment, housing and justice for exiled Nicaraguans, alongside continued international pressure on Managua to allow free elections and eventual transitional justice.

"As long as the dictatorship remains in power in Nicaragua, the forced displacement of Nicaraguans will persist," the Collective said, "and that is why we call on the international community to continue pressuring the regime for democratic processes, genuine elections and future transitional justice processes."