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Anita Wells named her nonprofit AbueNica — “Abue” for abuela and “Nica” for Nicaragua — because she sees herself as something like a grandmother to people who immigrate to the U.S. from her home country.
Wells, who was a restaurant owner before retiring, said her role is to listen and give advice. “I'm not a psychologist. I'm just a mom and a grandmother,” she said.
From her home base in northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., Wells assists Nicaraguan asylum seekers. More recently, she has been trying to help people apply for a Biden administration humanitarian parole program that first launched last October for Venezuelans and opened to Nicaraguans as well as Cubans and Haitians in January.
Since then, more than 45,000 Nicaraguans have been approved for parole. That's the smallest group from the four eligible countries, according to data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. To compare, more than twice as many people from Haiti have received it.
Immigrant advocates and volunteers, like Wells, say Nicaraguans are facing major obstacles in finding a sponsor with the financial means to apply with them as a financial guarantor. Sponsors need a minimum income of 125% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines for the household size (a household of two would need to make $28,350), or 100% if the sponsor is on active duty in the Armed Forces.
The median annual personal income for Nicaraguans who are 16 or older and live in the U.S. is $30,000, according to the Pew Research Center. Florida is home to the largest population of Nicaraguans in the U.S. Miami-Dade alone, with more than 103,000 Nicaraguans, has the single largest number of any U.S. county.
READ MORE: Migrants from some countries wait months for employment permit — while others can work right away
“The majority of Nicaraguans are hard working people" living paycheck to paycheck, Wells said. “It's very difficult to say, ‘I'm going to sponsor a family of three, four people, and children,' because it's a big financial responsibility with the United States government.”
In hopes of overcoming the challenges Nicaraguans especially face in accessing the parole program, a national network of grassroots volunteers has emerged, "like a big quilt of Nicaraguans who have been living in this country for many years,” Wells said.
Through her activism, Wells met Douglass Rossman of Everglades City, a volunteer who often travels two hours from his home on Florida's west coast to drive people to appointments at the immigration court in Miami.
“He’s incredible,” Wells said of Rossman.
Rossman has worked with another volunteer, Tamara Garcia of Doral, to help Nicaraguans who speak the indigenous language Miskito, rather than Spanish or English, navigate applications for parole and other immigration documents. "We do translations of documents for one another," Garcia said.
And whenever Garcia finds someone willing to sponsor a Nicaraguan migrant applying for humanitarian parole, she alerts Muriel Saenz in rural South Texas.
This "big quilt" is sewn together by common experiences and a common goal. All of the volunteers have been affected by the political turmoil in Nicaragua over the decades, and they all want to help others escape President Daniel Ortega's police state.
READ MORE: Here's where immigrants can go for help in South Florida
More than 40 members of Congress last week called out Ortega’s regime, writing in a letter to President Biden that it “has repeatedly violated human rights, suppressed political dissent and engaged in acts of violence against its citizens.”
Wells, who founded AbueNica, can empathize with people who have decided to leave Nicaragua, because she made that same difficult decision more than 40 years ago.
In 1979, a massive uprising by the far-left Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the dictatorship of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The Sandinistas, ironically led by Ortega, established their own authoritarian government, one that led Wells and her then-husband to flee by land in 1980. She has never been able to return.
“I want to see my country free before I die,” Wells said. “All I want is democracy in Nicaragua.”
After immigration court, a meal that tastes like home
When Douglas Rossman, who was born in Nicaragua, makes his regular trips to help fellow Nicaraguans navigate across the Florida peninsula, from Everglades City to Miami, one of the highlights is always lunch.
On a recent afternoon in September, Rossman and some fellow Nicaraguans who are settling in South Florida got in his car to run some errands. They also planned to stop at the Nicaraguan restaurant Pinolandia in Miami for some traditional dishes.
In the car, as it started to rain, they joked they should skip their errands and get straight to the food.
Rossman asked a woman sitting in the backseat if she would choose indio viejo, a Nicaraguan beef stew, or baho, a mix of meat, green plantains and yuca cooked in banana leaves.
“¡Qué rico!” she said. So good.
One passenger, Efraín Torrez, said he craved rondón, a seafood soup.
“Last time I had it was a year ago,” Torrez said in Spanish. “Our country has such good gastronomy.”
From home, Rossman makes video tutorials to help people navigate U.S. federal government bureaucracy. For instance, he took a screen recording from his phone and explained in Spanish how to apply for a work permit under the parole program, via the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website. Rossman said the videos help him reach more people at once.
He said word has spread that he's willing to help — and that means he gets hundreds of messages on WhatsApp.
“As a volunteer, we have a lot of people that we have to help,” he said. “We walk with them until they’re ready to run.”
Rossman has a job as a server in Everglades City. Back in Nicaragua, he worked on cruise ships. In 2021, he tried to return to Nicaragua after arriving in Florida for work, but authorities denied him reentry, so he stayed here.
Rossman suspects the decision to keep him out of Nicaragua had to do with work he had done for a political opponent of Ortega.
His own asylum application, which he submitted last year, is under review.
Still, he hasn’t lost hope that one day he will be able to return freely.
“A message for my Nicaragua people: Stay strong,” Rossman said, then switched to Spanish. “Estemos fuertes. Vamos a pasar esto. Todos los males pasan y Nicaragua va a ser libre otra vez.”
It's a message he offers to the people he serves, and one he needs himself: This, too, shall pass, and Nicaragua will be free again.
'An amazing way to touch lives'
Tamara Garcia spends a lot of time sitting at her kitchen table in Doral, working on her computer. A sticker on the bottom right corner of her laptop reads: “Nicaragua Libre."
Garcia came to the U.S. 25 years ago temporarily as a paid apprentice in the agriculture machinery industry, and she planned to go back and use her skills in her home country. But in 1998, the U.S. government extended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to the people of Nicaragua. Garcia applied for it.
Today, she’s a U.S. citizen, a full-time mother of four and a notary. She gives back by hosting Spanish-language classes for Nicaraguan migrants who speak only the indigenous language Miskito. She also connects people with mental health resources, as many have experienced trauma.
And she tries to recruit people who are in the U.S. legally to serve as sponsors for Nicaraguans, so they can apply for humanitarian parole through the Biden administration program. She also looks for those willing to give parolees a temporary place to stay while they get settled.
"To open the door and host somebody, that's an amazing way to touch lives, too,” Garcia said. “It is important for them to be able to have an opportunity to get out of Nicaragua and be able to breathe a little bit, have some of the freedoms that we have in the United States, for them to be able to continue careers.”
She helps people figure out how to get a driver’s license or navigate the bus system. How to register children in school or join a church.
“All the volunteers work with their own resources,” Garcia said. For example, she said, when they travel to D.C. to meet with members of Congress, those expenses are coming out of their pockets.
“We all have the will to serve, to lend a hand to someone.”
A call to help 'a fellow human from Nicaragua'
In 2018, hundreds of people were killed in Nicaragua during protests against Ortega’s regime. Muriel Saenz began receiving gruesome photos of torture victims, and she decided to dedicate her life to helping fellow Nicaraguans. She left her work as a certified occupational therapy assistant and licensed vocational nurse to volunteer full time.
Muriel Sanz left Nicaragua as a teenager and now lives in Texas. She formed a nonprofit called Nicaragüenses en el Mundo Texas. to assist newcomers to America from Nicaragua.
Since she is a volunteer and her husband will soon retire, Saenz said she doesn't have the income herself to sponsor parole applicants. But she works with nonprofits in Ohio and has other contacts around the U.S. that help her find sponsors.
READ MORE: How to apply for the Biden administration's humanitarian parole
She said it's not easy work, and not just because of money. Sometimes people are hesitant to help someone they don't know, and she tries to vet the parole applicants to ease potential sponsors' worries.
“I’m looking for anyone who’s an American citizen or a resident alien who would like to help a fellow human from Nicaragua fill out their application, possibly purchasing their airplane ticket,” she said.
If someone had welcomed her and made her feel safe in the U.S. when she first arrived here, it might have eased her mental health struggles, she said. She hopes to make that transition smooth for others.
"Nicaraguans are escaping a brutal regime right now,” she said. “I already sponsored 35 people and I received notification that there is about four or five sponsors and they're willing to sponsor the 12 people that I had on my waiting list,” Saenz said. “But I have more people asking to be sponsored.”
The stakes are high for migrants desperate to escape Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and for President Biden's re-election campaign. In the WLRN News series Waiting for America, we take a deep look at a humanitarian parole program for people from crisis-torn countries in Latin America and the Caribbean — a key Biden administration immigration policy — one year later.
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