US media and the human rights industry are portraying Jeffrey Jarquin as a heroic freedom fighter tortured and wrongly imprisoned by Nicaragua’s government. It turns out he was an opposition hooligan who destroyed a public university during the violent US-backed 2018 coup attempt.
On 1 October 2026, Jeffrey Isaac Jarquin, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan man, was deported from the United States by ICE and, on arrival in Managua, was immediately sent to prison by Nicaraguan authorities. Reports described him as a “torture victim,” a “political prisoner,” and a “prominent figure in the anti-government protests” that occurred in Nicaragua in 2018. His story was covered in uncritical fashion by the Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, The LA Times and other outlets. It featured on Democracy Now and he received support from the longtime former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth.
Not one of the reports, however, investigated Jarquin’s role in those “protests” nor recorded that in November 2018, he was found guilty of various acts of terrorism and sentenced to more than 16 years in prison.
“Tortured” or “torturer”?
Who is Jeffrey Isaac Jarquin, the man being championed by corporate media as a heroic freedom fighter tortured by an authoritarian regime?
In April 2018, protests began in Nicaragua which were part of a U.S.-led and funded coup attempt. Since the protests were ostensibly “student-led,” several universities in Managua were occupied and used as command centers by paid criminals whose financing originated from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
In May 2018, the authorities of Nicaragua’s free National Autonomous University (UNAN) announced that it had been forcefully occupied by outsiders. One of these was Jarquin, known colloquially as El Nene (“The Baby”). Anti-government groups were filmed in the university carrying firearms and using its facilities to make explosives. During the occupation they fired at vehicles carrying government supporters on a neighboring highway, wounding several (one, Carlos Sanchez, testified from his hospital bed). They also burned down university buildings, including the nursery. Photographic evidence collected afterwards showed in detail the destruction of the UNAN and the weapons recovered there.
President Daniel Ortega, speaking on July 19, 2018, described the UNAN and other occupied universities as “torture centers.” The university students’ union later made a detailed denunciation, pointing out that their leader had been left for dead by opposition thugs.
Arrest, conviction and amnesty
Jarquin was soon arrested and in November 2018 was convicted, along with eight others, of damage and destruction of the UNAN facilities, burning down the childcare center, blocking traffic and disturbing public order, robberies with intimidation, using university building 68 to torture people whom they considered infiltrators, and carrying illegal firearms. Although Jarquin was later sentenced to over 16 years in prison, he served only nine months.
In June 2019, Jarquin was released along with 55 other prisoners in a general amnesty for those who committed crimes during the coup attempt. The amnesty, however, was conditional: if released prisoners re-offended, they were subject to being put back in prison to carry out their original sentences.
Trump volunteer deported by Trump
A year later, Jarquin was briefly detained by Nicaraguan police on suspicion of selling drugs. He then seems to have made his way to the US southern border as an undocumented migrant and claimed asylum. In early 2026, US authorities rejected his asylum claim, following which he was subject to a deportation order.
During his time in the US, Jarquin advertised his services in helping Nicaraguans obtain legal residency and political asylum. He was also accused of having sold Nicaraguan passports, and boasting about it publicly on X.
In November 2024, Jarquin gained special access as a volunteer at a Trump re-election rally in Miami. There, he posed for a selfie with then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now Secretary of State.
On February 13, 2026, Jarquín was arrested in Miami and charged with battery following an alleged assault in Little Havana. Although the case didn’t proceed, Jarquin was transferred to ICE custody, held in the notorious “Alligator Island” ICE prison, and deported back to Nicaragua.
Deficiencies in reporting
We do not condone the way that Jarquin and other migrants have suffered at the hands of ICE. It should also be noted that, of more than 6000 Nicaraguans deported to their country so far this year, the vast majority have been welcomed by Nicaraguan authorities on their arrival and helped to return to their families.
Yet it is important to note the way that the reporting of Jarquin’s case reflects the unquestioning attitudes of corporate media in its coverage of Nicaragua, while omitting any mention of the violent campaign he helped lead against Nicaraguan citizens. Every one of the US media reports on his case contained at least two glaring deficiencies.
First, Jarquin’s portrayal of himself as a torture victim was accepted as fact, something that would not have occurred without further investigation if his claims had related to the US or to another Western country. Yet, while Nicaraguan opposition media – in most cases, funded by US agencies – have convinced human rights bodies to accept the torture narrative as true, there was plenty of contrary evidence from the time when Jarquin was in a Nicaraguan prison.
For example, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Nicaragua’s own human rights commissioner, and a Nicaraguan parliamentary commission all separately investigated torture allegations in 2018, inspecting prisons and interviewing “political” prisoners. Each found no truth in the claims after their visits, even though the IACHR later changed its stance under political pressure.
Second, reports on Jarquin’s case ignored plentiful evidence that Nicaragua’s universities – including the UNAN – were used as torture centers by the opposition.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal was the first international journalist to report from Nicaragua after the coup came to an end in July 2018. He visited the UNAN, interviewed displaced students and photographed the destruction.
Blumenthal reported: “Western media paints Nicaragua’s opposition as basically peaceful, democratic victims of unprovoked repression. I visited UNAN today, a public university in Managua they occupied & ransacked. They burned this campus childcare center before they were driven out by police on 7/13.”
The violence at the UNAN was hardly exceptional. A detailed critique of Amnesty International’s reporting on the Nicaragua coup attempt, Dismissing the Truth, provided detailed evidence of killings and torture by opposition operatives and contrasted their findings with false testimony in Amnesty’s reports. As authors, we have met torture victims ourselves and verified their claims.
During the violent 2018 coup against Nicaragua’s Sandinista-run government, US corporate media and the human rights industry falsely portrayed the Washington-backed opposition as pure-hearted victims of the bloodshed. It is no surprise then that they would whitewash the record of a US-backed opposition activist who helped destroy a public university.