From Chindandega, Nicaragua, Fatima’s voice cuts in and out over the phone. Beeping sounds can be heard before she gets a signal again.
“Sorry, I don’t have good cellphone service here,” Fatima said in Spanish.
Fatima self-deported six months ago from Spokane out of fear of being detained, despite an ongoing asylum case. Her partner had been detained a little over a year earlier, an experience she said contributed to her fear of being detained and possibly separated from her 1-year-old. She said she continues to live in fear of the Nicaraguan government’s crackdown on religious freedom and anyone who speaks against the president, but felt returning was a better choice.
The Spokesman-Review and Spokane Public Radio agreed to withhold Fatima’s last name because she fears for her safety over religious persecution now that she’s back in Nicaragua.
“On one hand, I feel grateful to God because He gave me the opportunity to return and be with my family, but on the other hand I feel sad because the economy here isn’t great, and it’s worse if you have children,” she said. “I want to be able to provide for my children and for them to learn English.”
Fatima is one of several people who have decided to self-deport during the Trump administration amid its mass deportation efforts. In an email, the Department of Homeland Security states 2.2 million unauthorized immigrants have self-deported since January 2025. The federal agency did not state how many in Washington have self-deported.
“The current cost of a single enforced deportation is $18,245. With the new offer of a $2,600 stipend, the cost of a single self-deportation via the CBP Home App will be just $5,100 – saving the American taxpayer over $13,000 per illegal alien,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its email.
However, researcher Edward Kissam suggests the total number of self-deportations of unauthorized immigrants for the first year of the Trump administration might actually be around 200,000 individuals.
Kissam frequently contributes to studies and articles regarding immigrant rights, such as for Immigrants Rising and the Center for Migration Studies.
“There would be a labor market with indicators showing that level of massive exit,” Kissam said.
Sam Smith, attorney at Manzanita House, said the organization has received at least a dozen inquiries about self-deportation. Smith confirms two clients have self-deported – one who didn’t notify Smith, which caused complications.
“The most we heard was rumors, and, I mean, it impacts us to some degree,” Smith said. “We’re handling their case in a way that best protects their interests, and it’s hard to do that if we’re not aware of what’s going on or to advise them on the consequences of departing.”
Smith added that even if the client self-deports, they can’t withdraw from the case until a judge says they can.
“We’re still expected to respond to most letters or orders from the court, or show up to hearings if we need to,” he said.
A raft to the American dream
In 2022 Fatima spent 20 days traveling from Nicaragua in hopes of reaching the border between Mexico and the United States.
Her last obstacle was to cross the Rio Grande, a roughly 1,900-mile river that runs between Texas and four Mexican states. It’s also known as the “Rio Bravo del Norte,” or Fierce River of the North, due to its dangerous currents.
According to the Global Investigative Journalism Network, an estimated 1,107 individuals drowned in the river between 2017 and 2023.
“We crossed using a raft, and it took all day because it was a pretty large group,” Fatima said. “I was really scared.”
After making it across the river, she turned herself in to Border Patrol and spent three days at a processing center before being released and given one year to apply for asylum.
However, Fatima said she did not begin gathering documentation to support her asylum case until almost two years after her arrival to the United States. She got started after her partner had been detained by immigration agents.
Fatima said her decision to embark on this near-month journey came after Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo intensified the government’s shift toward an authoritarian dictatorship, characterized by a severe crackdown on dissent, civil society and the Catholic Church.
Being Catholic herself, Fatima said she felt scared to live in her home country.
“Before I would get together with the youth to read the Bible, but they prohibited that,” she said. “You can’t practice your religion in public settings anymore. Only inside the church.”
A 2025 National Catholic Reporter article states several members of the Catholic Church are in exile, many of whom are nuns, bishops, clergies and seminarians. Overall, more than 340,000 Nicaraguans have sought asylum since 2018, primarily in Costa Rica, the United States, Mexico and Spain, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
Stephen Schneck, commissioner for the U.S. Committee on International Religious Freedom, said this came after the Catholic Church provided refuge to those injured when the Nicaraguan government violently repressed protests in 2018 due to proposed changes to its welfare system. More than 300 people were killed, and at least 2,000 were injured.
“President Daniel Ortega and his wife, self-appointed Co-President Rosario Murillo, view the Catholic Church as a political opponent and, since 2018, have intensified and expanded their persecution of religious communities,” Schneck said.
He said the Ortega-Murillo government has prohibited processions on major holidays and pastoral missions.
Since being back, Fatima said nothing has changed.
“We aren’t able to express our religious freedom,” she said.
Serena Cosgrove, international studies professor at Seattle University, said anybody who speaks against the government is at risk, not just those who are part of the church.
Cosgrove said she had been traveling to Nicaragua regularly since the 1980s due to interest in researching and writing about the history of different countries in Central America.
The last time she visited was in 2019 after speaking about global poverty at Seattle University’s former sister Jesuit college, La Universidad Centroamericana, or Central American University. She said she was staying on campus, where leaders of the university were already receiving death threats and students were being repressed for protesting.
She said the partnership ended in 2023 after Central American University was taken over by the government. Twenty-seven other universities have closed since 2021.
Cosgrove doesn’t plan to go back anytime soon .
“The repression continues. It’s like this eerie silence,” Cosgrove said. “The Nicaraguan government has been taking away Nicaraguans’ citizenship so that basically it leaves people without a country.
“Then they get stuck in whatever country they found themselves in because they can’t return home because their citizenship has been stripped, and yet they can’t stay where they are unless they go through some kind of an asylum process.”
While Fatima fled Nicaragua in search of safety and stability, she said fear eventually found her again in the United States.
‘Arrested at gunpoint’
Once Fatima arrived in the United States in 2022, she moved between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene because of her partner’s job working in construction. She said he was already in the area when she arrived.
Eventually, she spent most of her time living in Spokane, while her partner continued traveling to North Idaho for work.
But in 2023, she said immigration agents pulled him over while in Spirit Lake, leading to his detention at the Tacoma ICE facility, where he was held for four months.
Some of his coworkers in the car weren’t detained because they had ongoing immigration cases, she said. Her partner, however, did not have a driver’s license and had not turned himself in to Border Patrol after crossing the border, as she had done.
“They arrested him at gunpoint,” Fatima said.
Border Patrol believes it was an FBI-led operation. The federal agency didn’t immediately give any additional information.
Fatima said her partner was able to get released on a $5,000 bond after four months in early 2024, with the help of an attorney working pro bono with detainees at the Tacoma detention facility.
After his release, she applied for asylum, although she feared she too would get detained.
Once she applied, Fatima found out she was pregnant while beginning to attend court hearings for her case in 2024. She said the hearings were going well, despite not having legal representation, up until the Trump administration took office.
After seeing several asylum-seeking families being separated, by late 2025, she and her partner decided to return to Nicaragua with their now-1-year-old.
“I had another in-person court hearing for February, but I was too scared to go at that point,” Fatima said.
Even so, leaving wasn’t easy, Fatima said. She misses Spokane and the community she had built. She said she felt people supported one another and made her feel like she belonged. That support came in different ways, including help from community leaders with her asylum case, Fatima said. At other times, it meant assistance with diapers for her newborn.
“Sometimes you just want to get ahead, especially when you have kids, but we didn’t get that opportunity with everything going on under that administration,” Fatima said.
Reporter Alexandra Duggan contributed to this article.
Monica Carrillo-Casas, reporting on northeastern rural communities for the Spokesman-Review, is with the Washington State Murrow Fellowships, a local news program supported by state legislators.
