SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — When Adolfo Román García-Ramírez walks home in the evening from his shift at a grocery store in this central Colorado mountain town, sometimes he thinks back on his childhood in Nicaragua. Adults, he recollects, would scare the kids with tales of the “Mona Bruja,” or “Monkey Witch.” Step too far into the dark, they told him, and you might just get snatched up by the giant monstrous monkey who lives in the shadows.
Now, when García-Ramírez looks over his shoulder, it’s not monster monkeys he is afraid of. It’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
“There’s this constant fear that you’ll be walking down the street and a vehicle rolls up,” García-Ramírez, 57, said in Spanish. “They tell you, ‘We’re from ICE; you’re arrested,’ or, ‘Show me your papers.’”
Silverthorne, a commuter town between the ski meccas of Breckenridge and Vail, has been García-Ramírez’s home for the past two years. He works as a cashier at the grocery and shares a two-bedroom apartment with four roommates.
The town of nearly 5,000 has proved a welcome haven for the political exile, who was released from prison in 2023 after Nicaragua’s authoritarian government brokered a deal with the U.S. government to transfer more than 200 political prisoners to the U.S. The exiles were offered temporary residency in the U.S. under a Biden administration humanitarian parole program.
García-Ramírez’s two-year humanitarian parole expired in February, just a few weeks after President Dona …