Spain granted asylum to 5,747 Nicaraguans between 2018 and 2025, a period in which requests for international protection increased after the April 2018 protests and the repression that followed in Nicaragua. Figures from Spain's Office of Asylum and Refuge place Nicaragua among the three countries with the most beneficiaries of international protection in Spain. Over those eight years, Spain received 20,931 asylum applications from Nicaraguan citizens.
Asylum is granted when there is a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Available information shows that favourable decisions increased from 2020, after an initially limited response. The human-rights group Colectivo de Derechos Humanos Nicaragua Nunca Más estimated that at least 800,000 Nicaraguans left the country between April 2018 and November 2025. That figure equals 11.6% of the total population and reflects a movement whose main destinations also included Costa Rica and the United States, according to Confidencial.digital.
Applications in Spain rose from 1,368 in 2018 to 5,935 in 2019. Only four cases received a favourable decision in 2018, while 166 people received international protection in 2019. Favourable resolutions increased from 2020. In 2025, Spain approved 27% of resolved applications from Nicaraguan citizens, and that nationality ranked second for positive decisions. Mali led approvals with 25,125 cases, followed by Syria with 7,997.
Before the 2018 crisis, only 31 Nicaraguans had applied for asylum in Spain, and none of those requests had been accepted, according to the Confidencial.digital analysis. Between 2019 and 2024, the Spanish government rejected 8,040 asylum applications from Nicaraguan citizens. Although the number of new files later fell, Nicaragua remained from 2018 among the ten nationalities with the most protection requests, behind Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Honduras.
Madrid accounted for 4,291 asylum applications from Nicaraguan citizens between 2018 and 2024. The largest number came in 2019, when the Spanish capital received 1,965 files. Spain also transferred 930 Nicaraguan citizens who were in third countries through the National Resettlement Programme. The transfers took place between 2023 and 2024, and most of the people came from Costa Rica.
In January 2026, Spain announced a regularisation programme for 500,000 undocumented foreigners who can show at least five months of residence before 31 December 2025. According to the analysis, the measure could benefit nearly 29,000 Nicaraguans who remain in an irregular situation. Regularisation is a route separate from an asylum application and applies to foreigners who meet the residence requirement set by the Spanish authorities.
Costa Rica recorded 262,066 refugee applications from Nicaraguan citizens between 2018 and 2025, according to the Refugee Unit of the Directorate General of Migration and Foreigners. In the first half of 2026, the country added more than 8,000 new requests. Between 2018 and December 2024, Costa Rican authorities granted refuge to 15,327 Nicaraguans. Even with those decisions, more than 170,000 applications remained pending, equal to 63% of the accumulated cases.
In 2025, Costa Rica launched a plan to reduce the migration backlog. As part of that measure, the authorities closed more than 70,000 files because applicants withdrew or because the people obtained another migration category. The number of cases without a decision remained high in the Costa Rican refugee system, and the pending files corresponded to applications accumulated since the start of the migration crisis.
The United States received 63,522 political-asylum applications from Nicaraguans between 2018 and 2025. Of that total, 2,792 received a favourable decision, equal to 4.40% of the recorded requests. The largest annual volume came in 2023, with 33,970 applications. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics recorded 1,020 favourable decisions for that year. The report states that the second administration of Donald Trump changed the flow of Nicaraguan migration toward the United States because of a hostile climate toward the immigrant community. Spain, Costa Rica and the United States accounted for part of the protection applications filed by Nicaraguan citizens since 2018.