Yadira Cordoba: “I’m Asking to be Deported to Regain My Freedom”
The detained April Mother in San Antonio asks to be sent to another country and says: “I can’t return to Nicaragua, but I also can’t remain imprisoned”
HAVANA TIMES – Nicaraguan Yadira Cordoba, a member of the April Mothers Association (AMA), remains confined in a migrant detention center in San Antonio, Texas. While awaiting deportation, she denounces that US authorities are delaying her case and longs to “regain” her freedom.
In an audio recording obtained by CONFIDENCIAL, Cordoba says that a US immigration official informed her she would be deported to Honduras, but that the government of that country refused to receive her.
“I told them to take me wherever, but to give me my freedom. They are violating my rights, because they tell me one thing today and something else tomorrow, and they don’t take me out (of the detention center),” she says.
“I came seeking protection and freedom”
A US immigration judge in Texas rejected the Nicaraguan woman’s request for political asylum and ordered her deportation to Honduras in early November 2025. However, despite having signed the order, she has still not received an answer as to where she will be sent.
“I need to be taken out of here now. It doesn’t matter where they send me, but I need to leave this place. Send me to Mexico, because they know very well that my story is real, I’m not making anything up. I can’t return to Nicaragua, but I also can’t remain imprisoned,” Cordoba insists.
The Nicaraguan woman arrived in the United States in 2023, fleeing political violence in Nicaragua after the murder of her son Orlando Cordoba during a protest in 2018. After entering the country, she applied for political asylum, but on August 20, 2025, she was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Cordoba explains that she has “already paid” by being detained for having entered the United States without papers. “I came to this country looking for freedom and protection,” she says.
The long process for Yadira Córdoba
In an interview with CONFIDENCIAL, Ronald Cordoba, Yadira Cordoba’s son, said they hope his mother will be sent to a safe country, which is obviously not Nicaragua, because they do not want her to become an “easy target” of the transnational repression of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
The political asylum trial in the United States has been “very emotionally difficult for her,” Ronald lamented. The April Mother has told her story over and over again, which —according to her son— causes her to “reopen the wounds and once again touch all those feelings, feel them again like the first time, like reopening that pain, those tears.”
According to Ronald Cordoba, his mother said through tears during the hearing that “this process has not been easy. It is very hard to reopen my wounds and remember everything I have lived through because of a murderous government.”
She had to “see my brother (Orlando Cordoba, 15 years old) dead, and have to bury him. Then be forcibly exiled to Costa Rica and later have to go into forced exile again out of fear, insecurity, in search of a place where she could feel safe, a place where she could have a bit of peace. And now to be (in the US) in this situation,” he recounted.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.