Doctor’s political asylum quest still in limbo
More than three years after he fled Nicaragua seeking political asylum, Dr. Luis Rodolfo Ibarra is still waiting for a hearing in Orlando immigration court.
Ibarra, 35, said he wants a judge to know that he put his oath as a doctor above government orders in 2018 when he treated wounded civilian protesters who sought to dismantle President Daniel Ortega’s regime.
His defiance cost him a prominent job at a hospital in the Central American country. The barrage of death threats as he was branded a terrorist on social media put his
wife, Dayring Ruiz, and daughter Josephine, now 4, in danger.
Ibarra illegally entered the U.S. in September 2018 with swelling from multiple fractures after being kidnapped and beaten by a paramilitary group, he said. The 2,700-mile journey through Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico eventually ended at the U.S. border in Arizona, where Ibarra crossed over, waited to be apprehended by Border Patrol agents and filed for asylum.
He was taken in by Mary and Fred Hoffman, a DeLand couple Ibarra met as a child during a church mission trip. The Hoffmans maxed out their home equity loan for a $28,000 bond that secured Ibarra’s release from an Arizona detention center.
A hearing for Ibarra’s asylum case was set for July in Orlando, then abruptly canceled because of COVID concerns, his lawyer Rusten Hurd said. Online court records show there are no future hearings scheduled for Ibarra’s case, which has been consolidated with his wife and daughter’s requests for asylum.
“I don’t know why — [the courts] don’t provide that information — some cases are rescheduled, many others are not,” Hurd said.
The efficiency of the U.S.’s immigration system has been in decline for decades across several presidential administrations, Hurd said, but the pandemic and government shutdowns exacerbated the backlog of cases.
“You have a system right now that is just non-functional,” Hurd said. “We have more and more people, and they’re all upset, and it just becomes so tough for anybody
in the system. The clients are stressed, the court workers are stressed, the attorneys — it’s not easy for us either.”
As of December, Ibarra’s case was among about 75,000 pending in Orlando’s immigration court, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Out of those, nearly 1,500 are from Nicaragua, a spike from the 81 cases in 2018 at the height of anti-government protests.
“In 2018 and early 2019, they fled to save their lives,” Ibarra said. “Now, they’re running away because of economic problems. The government has manipulated prices of all the goods to keep the population oppressed.”
‘You’re coming with us’
After Ibarra fled the country, Ruiz and their daughter Josephine, then about a year old, went into hiding, but it wasn’t long until Nicaraguan police broke down their door looking for him.
“They told me, ‘If your husband isn’t here, then you’re coming with us,’ ” said Ruiz, 28.
Josephine saw that her mother was scared and tried to hug her, but was yanked away by an officer and slammed into a wall, Ruiz said. Pictures of Josephine’s battered face with a gash above her eye are among the pile of evidence for their family’s asylum case shown to the Orlando Sentinel.
Ruiz said she frantically called Ibarra to let him know of her arrest. Josephine was left behind with a neighbor until her grandmother could be reached.
Ibarra “was hysterical, he was screaming, there was nothing he could do from that far away,” Mary Hoffman said. “It was very traumatic.”
Ruiz was taken to jail, stripsearched by male police officers and interrogated, she said. Guards would sporadically throw buckets of cold water on her. She was woken up every three hours to answer more questions.
“They abused me physically, verbally and psychologically,” she said. “One of the threats was taking my daughter away from me.”
Ruiz said she shared information about her husband that she believed the Nicaraguan government already knew. After a week of abuse and interrogation, Ruiz said she was released from jail.
Ortega’s administration made a deal with the opposition — amid international pressure — to release hundreds of political prisoners, but the law also shielded police officers and the paramilitary from prosecution for any human rights violations.
‘Jail or a death sentence’
In May 2019, Ruiz and Josephine made the dangerous trek to the U.S.-Mexico border near Texas. She said her daughter was hoisted up over the wall and dropped into her waiting arms by a coyote, a human smuggler.
The mother and daughter were briefly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then filed for asylum.
The Hoffmans booked them on a flight to reunite with Ibarra, who waited at the airport with balloons and flowers.
The cuts and bruises on Josephine’s face have healed, but the trauma lingers, Ruiz said. Flashing lights on an ambulance or patrol vehicle trigger her anxiety. She panicked during a fire drill at school.
The frequency of her
nightmares has lessened, partly with the help of a psychologist, Ruiz said.
Ibarra and his family have a modest house in DeLand, but the Hoffmans’ home was their first sanctuary in the U.S. Last month, Josephine pranced around the gazebo wearing a leopard print dress and kitty ears, then rolled a baseball on the ground with Fred Hoffman. She doesn’t always scream in terror anymore at the sight of local law enforcement officers — it helps that they’re not carrying assault rifles on patrol, her parents said.
Ibarra can’t practice medicine in the U.S. but has a work permit and now operates a forklift to support his family. His taxes are high because he can’t claim his wife and daughter as dependents until they’re given social security numbers.
“What we wish for the most, is for our asylum case to be approved,” Ruiz said. “What is happening? How much longer?”
The couple said they thought things would calm down in Nicaragua after they fled, but four years have passed and their families still don’t have peace.
Ortega won a fourth straight term last month through an election U.S. officials dubbed a “sham.” Ruiz said family members spotted her father’s name on the voter list — he died about five years ago. While Ortega’s power remains intact, Ibarra said it’s not safe for his family to return to their home country.
“It’s basically jail or a death sentence,” Ibarra said. “At an international level, justice is pretty slow. No country is going to invade Nicaragua and defend the people.”