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Apiñas and her family are part of a mass exodus of the Miskito Indigenous community, descendants of Indigenous people, Europeans and Africans.

It is the first significant escalation of Miskito migration to the U.S. since the Nicaraguan civil war of the 1980s.

They departed from the wooden hut they shared with a relative in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, in October, two weeks after the government jailed Brooklyn Rivera, an advocate and elected representative of the Miskito nations.

In distant villages inhabited by Indigenous people known as the Miskito, homes were leveled and growing fields were ravaged.

“We are struggling to restore democracy,” said Daisy George West, a member of Nicaragua’s Miskito community, a minority group that lives on the country’s eastern coast and has fought to preserve its culture and political freedom.