dissent

The government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has been accused of human rights abuses against critics.

Nicaragua’s government has stripped masses of lawyers of their licences to practise, in what critics see as yet another attack on the country’s critics.

On Friday, a United Nations expert called the government’s actions a “purge of the legal profession”, aimed at eroding the country’s final shreds of democratic checks and balances.

Nicaragua’s husband-wife co-presidents, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, have led a government that has increasingly carried out an all-out crackdown on dissent.

That effort intensified after mass social protests in 2018 that the government violently repressed.

Since then, the government has imprisoned adversaries, religious leaders, journalists and others, forcing thousands to flee the country. It has also stripped hundreds of their Nicaraguan citizenship and possessions.

Since 2018, it has also shut down more than 5,000 nongovernmental organisations, largely religious groups, but also local rotary clubs and scouting organisations.

In recent days, lawyers noticed that their licences to practise law in Nicaragua were removed without explanation from the Supreme Court of Justice’s registry, according to Reed Brody, an American human rights lawyer and member of a UN panel of experts on the Central American country.

Other lawyers also confirmed their certifications were revoked.

There was no official notification by the government, and Nicaragua’s government did not respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press news agency.

Brody said the full scope of the revocation was not immediately clear, but it “would certainly appear to be at least hundreds, if not thousands of lawyers” who were affected.

“This follows the pattern that we’ve been seeing for years. First, they closed the NGOs, the universities, the independent media. You know, they’ve gone after the churches, and now it seems the legal profession,” Brody said. “Anyone who might stand between the government and citizens.”

Brody said he knew of at least 20 lawyers who had been affected.

Juan Diego Barberena, a lawyer and human rights defender exiled in Costa Rica since 2022, was among those stripped of his official certification and said he knew of at least 25 more colleagues like him.

On Thursday, Barberena tried to access his legal accreditation on the government’s database and said his name and licence number were wiped clean from the system.

“This is a means of exercising totalitarian control over the legal profession,” Barberena said. “This means that the dictatorship can decide who gets to practise and who doesn’t.”

The move echoes other steps the government has taken in recent years.

Many Nicaraguan exiles who were stripped of their citizenship and rendered “stateless” have reported similar stories. They or their family members would search for their birth certificates and other legal documents in official databases, only to be told they do not exist.

But Barberena and Brody said the move this week by authorities went a step further, noting that those erased from the system were not just dissenters. Some were simply Nicaraguans living abroad.

Others practised criminal or family law that didn’t touch on politics, while some were government sympathisers, Barberena said.

Brody framed it as a move to whittle away at any last remaining shred of independence in a judicial system already firmly under control of Ortega and Murillo.

“On one hand, it’s an arbitrary measure to punish political dissent,” Barberena said. “On the other, it’s the dictatorship looking medium-term and wanting to prevent lawyers, experts and academics from participating in the future of the country’s institutions.”

In 1913, Antonino Alati left southern Italy to find a better life in a land where many people regarded him as little better than scum.

He joined millions of his fellow countrymen in the United States, where the press vilified Italians as poor, dirty, violent Catholics who had too many babies, refused to assimilate and could never possibly be considered “white.”

Politicians were already working to shut the door on them. A congressional report released two years before Alati’s arrival cited southern Italians as evidence that “the new immigration as a class is far less intelligent than the old.” They came to the U.S., the report asserted, “with the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then returning to the old country.”

Alati wouldn’t let bigotry win. He soon sent for his wife and children, including his infant son Salvatore. Alati turned to Alito, Salvatore became Samuel. A generation later, the family had a Supreme Court justice in Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the second Italian American, after Antonin Scalia, to sit on the highest court in the land.

During his 2005 confirmation hearings, Alito praised his father as an “extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame many difficulties” to ensure a better life for him and his sister. By then, Italian Americans were established as an essential part of this country’s fabric, from music to politics to food.

It’s the most American of tales — which is why it’s so surprising, yet not, to read Alito’s blistering dissent in the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision rejecting President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship.

If there’s one constant in this country besides death and taxes, it’s how quickly descendants of immigrants, and sometimes immigrants themselves, forget how loathed their ethnic group was and how they proved the haters wrong. Too many become uncharitable to the policies that helped them and the immigrants who followed.

But Alito’s stance against birthright citizenship goes beyond just forgetting his roots. His 39-page opinion describes the supposed impact of undocumented migrants on the U.S., using words — “overran,” “soared,” “exploded,” “massive,” “a stream,” “huge” — that read like the same invective used against Italians in his grandfather and father’s time.

The justice channels anti-Italian conspiracies of the past by casting doubt on the national allegiances of the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants — the same patriotism test that Italian Americans faced generations ago when xenophobes questioned their Catholicism. Alito claims without evidence that millions of agricultural workers were able to apply for American citizenship after President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty “at least in part because of fraud” — a charge also leveled against Italians who sought to naturalize back in the day.

And so it goes, each passage a jumbled argument dressed up in judicial interpretations largely rejected by his fellow Catholic Supreme Court justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Coney Barrett signed on to the majority opinion that Roberts wrote, and Kavanaugh concurred.

Rev. William Barber II speaks during a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1 while justices heard oral arguments on birthright citizenship.

(Al Drago / Getty Images)

I know how quickly families forget their own immigrant histories. Yet I look at people like Alito and wonder how they ended up thinking the way they do, because I could never imagine doing the same.

My maternal grandmother was born in Arizona to parents who fled their home country during the Mexican Revolution, becoming an American citizen by birthright. My father, who crossed the border in the trunk of a Chevy, legalized his status in an era when it was far easier to do so.

Like Alito’s paisanes, my Mexican family was also demonized for supposedly being insufficiently American and posing a threat to national unity. They also sacrificed their own dreams so their children and grandchildren could achieve theirs.

And just like Alito, some members of my family have forgotten our history and support Trump or favor some of his immigration policies, dismissing new arrivals as criminals or lazy. That’s why I will always side with undocumented people and welcome anyone who gives birth in this country with the hope that their newborn finds a better life.

It seems from his dissent that Alito somewhat agrees with me. He posits that millions of Americans who were born in this country to parents without papers “have a strong moral claim to be able to remain in the land where they grew up.” Congress “can and should address their situation,” he writes.

The justice blasts birth tourism, where women from China and other countries travel to the U.S. to have a baby, then return home, benefiting from our generosity and offering nothing in return.

I agree that’s a mockery of what being an American should be and ruins it for people who want to contribute to building a better nation. But Alito throws out the baby with the bathwater by failing to recognize that Trump’s attempt to erase birthright citizenship via executive order is presidential overreach based on bigotry, not rule of law. He’d rather cut up the Constitution to spite something he doesn’t like. Thank God his side lost, yet it’s sad that Trump’s pathetic attempt to define who can be an American went as far as it did.

Alito concludes by stating that the court’s decision to uphold the 14th Amendment is “a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.”

What new immigrants might inflict on this country is the perpetual worry of immigration restrictionists — and yet history keeps proving them wrong. Alito’s family did; so did mine. Only in these United States can the progeny of people once portrayed as parasites and invaders side with those making the same argument about the latest batch of newcomers.

History will see Alito’s vote for what it is: a forsaking of the promise his family once fulfilled, to support the people who never wanted them here in the first place.

As the US expands its war with Iran, opposition is growing – not just among the public, but inside the military itself. Some service members are questioning orders, exploring conscientious objection, and speaking out. What’s driving this shift, and how far could it go?

In this episode: 

• Mike Prysner (@MikePrysner), Executive Director of the Center on Conscience & War

Episode credits: 

This episode was produced by Marcos Bartolomé, Tamara Khandaker, and Sarí El-Khalili with Spencer Cline, Tuleen Barakat, and our host, Malika Bilal. It was edited by Tamara Khandaker and Noor Wazwaz. 

Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer.

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