Akin Helps Free Falsely Convicted Nicaraguan Missionaries

For several years, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, who is Ortega's wife, have led a crackdown on Catholic Church leaders in the country and others they deem a threat to their authoritarian rule.

Priests have been arrested and exiled, and any Catholic presence in Nicaragua has been essentially expelled.

Last December, the government of Nicaragua — already facing increasing sanctions due to various human rights abuses — detained 11 Nicaraguan pastors associated with the Texas-based Protestant ministry Mountain Gateway, along with two local attorneys who performed legal work for the group.

But after a pro bono effort from a group of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP attorneys who helped with diplomatic negotiations between the U.S. and Nicaraguan governments, the 13 Nicaraguans affiliated with Mountain Gateway were released on Sept. 5 after almost nine months of wrongful imprisonment.

The church members were among a group of 135 people who traveled to Guatemala to seek refugee status as part of a deal brokered by the U.S. government.

Akin partner Ryan Fayhee told Law360 in a recent interview that the 13 detainees are currently receiving physical and mental health treatment.

"They were all held in fairly deplorable conditions, although no one was able to visit them because they weren't allowed to be visited," Fayhee said. "They were held for the entire time without any access or visits from their family, so it was a pretty awful many months."

Fayhee said some members of the Mountain Gateway group thought they'd never see the light of day again after being baselessly accused of money laundering and organized crime.

"There was essentially a secret trial that was swift, and then a sentence that was draconian," he said.

The Nicaraguan government sentenced each of the 11 pastors and the two lawyers to between 10 and 15 years in prison, as well as $80 million each in fines.


Fayhee said the founders of Mountain Gateway, Jon Britton Hancock and his wife, Audrey, along with their children, have spent most of their adult lives in service to others. They first lived in rural parts of Mexico before moving to Nicaragua in 2013.

Besides organizing evangelistic crusades, Mountain Gateway helps rural Latin American communities gain access to clean running water, food and farming opportunities. For instance, Mountain Gateway opened a coffee plantation in Nicaragua to help the local community develop agricultural skills, Fayhee said.

In recent years, the Hancocks have resettled in their native Texas and have traveled back and forth to Nicaragua as they've carried out their work with Mountain Gateway. While they were charged as part of the government's crackdown on Mountain Gateway, the family was in Texas at the time and not detained. Fayhee said they would be immediately arrested if they were to attempt to return to Nicaragua.

In a statement last month, Jon Hancock said he was elated about news of the release of the pastors and attorneys.

"Today, we cry tears of joy because our brothers and sisters are free!" he said.

Akin's Role

Besides Fayhee, the Akin team included Washington, D.C., partners G. Hunter Bates, Claudius Modesti and Steven Schulman; senior policy advisers Roger Murry and Galen Roehl; counsel Lide Paterno and senior adviser Ryan Thompson.

Akin said its advocacy work on behalf of Mountain Gateway included close coordination with the White House, the State Department and Capitol Hill, and resulted in House and Senate resolutions in support of the detainees as well as ongoing efforts to stop the Nicaraguan government's abuse of the Interpol system to target victims and interfere with humanitarian work.

Akin's litigation, regulatory, pro bono, public policy and lobbying groups worked together on the effort. The firm assembled a bipartisan group in the House and the Senate to strongly call on the Nicaraguan government to release the detainees.

Fayhee said the firm worked extensively with the State Department and the National Security Council, and lent support to the pastors after their arrival in Guatemala City.

The firm was in constant close contact with the government to find a resolution.

"We were very supportive of the U.S. State Department's efforts to negotiate with the Nicaraguans to secure this release," Fayhee said. "There was lots of effort through our lobbying practice to work with Congress and raise the profile of the case at the same time."

Besides the obvious immigration issues, Akin lawyers worked with the State Department on logistics and planning to keep officials across multiple government departments up to speed on where the matter stood in Nicaragua.

"There was obviously a Nicaraguan lawyer representing Mountain Gateway, who was a key part of trying to resolve the matter, so we had to make sure that across the U.S. government, there was clarity on information, [and] an understanding of, to the best of our ability, how people were doing physically and mentally in this prison setting with such limited access," Fayhee said.

On the logistics front, the firm also had to make sure that the families were received in Guatemala. The detainees arrived in Guatemala immediately after being released on Sept. 5.

"Ultimately, I expect a number of them to relocate to Texas to a property owned by Mountain Gateway for their continued recuperation," he said.

The firm's pro bono work with Mountain Gateway will continue with support on immigration-related matters as members of the group begin the process of seeking U.S. refugee status or other lawful migration pathways from their current stay in Guatemala.

"We all shared a deep commitment to these people's fundamental right to freedom, and we believed we could leverage the firm's core strengths across lobbying, crisis communications and crisis management to achieve the only acceptable outcome," Modesti, a member of the firm's white collar and government investigations practice, said in a statement.

Fayhee credits Akin's lobbying practice with playing a key role in the Mountain Gateway matter and others.

"That talent was really huge," he said.

In addition, Schulman, who leads Akin's pro bono practice, and his team of lawyers who focus exclusively on pro bono helped manage many of the challenging immigration issues and others involving refugees in Nicaragua.

"With Mountain Gateway, while the Americans in question were never in custody, there were Interpol red notices put out, and a desire to try to gain custody of these American citizens," Fayhee said. Interpol describes a red notice as a request to law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender or similar legal action.

Many of the people involved with Mountain Gateway were really targeted because of their connection to the church leadership and American citizens, he said.

"And now, unfortunately, they and their families are refugees from Nicaragua, so there's this challenging issue around how to make sure they're safe and can be protected moving forward," Fayhee said. "Likely, many of them will ultimately come to the United States, though that's their decision ultimately."

Fayhee's Work

Fayhee is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, where he specialized in national security cases.

In 2015, he left the Department of Justice after nearly 11 years to enter private practice, looking for a way to leverage his government skills into a pro bono practice.

"My approach really has to do with both raising the profile of the matter within Washington, D.C., engagement with Congress, engagement with the NSC and the White House, and then, oftentimes, engagement with the State Department," Fayhee said.

The goal, he added, is to work across Washington to ensure that the government is thinking about human rights matters and all their facets and complexity, and then trying to work with foreign governments to try to find a solution.

Prior relationships he developed working on other high-profile wrongful detention cases proved instrumental in the Mountain Gateway matter.

"I have only handled wrongful detention … cases pro bono," he said. "Some, I have helped secure the release. In others, I have helped on reintegration once a hostage was recovered."

Since early 2019, while a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, he has represented a number of Americans being wrongfully detained or held hostage.

"The very first client I had has finally been released," he said. "I represented Paul Whelan, who recently was released as part of the prisoner swap with Russia."

Whelan, a 54-year-old Michigan man, was given a 16-year jail sentence in 2020 after being detained in Moscow two years earlier on suspicion of spying. While he was left out of other prisoner swaps with Russia, such as the one that led to the release of U.S. women's basketball star Brittney Griner, Whelan was ultimately released at the beginning of August.

Fayhee also represented Rwandan human rights activist Paul Rusesabagina when he was arrested by the Rwandan government in 2020 on terrorism charges. Rusesabagina earned renown after saving the lives of his family and more than 1,000 other refugees by providing them with shelter during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. His story later served as inspiration for the film "Hotel Rwanda," released in 2004.

Rusesabagina was taken into custody by the Rwandan government in 2020 after being lured to the country on a chartered flight from Dubai that he believed was going to Burundi, Fayhee said. He was tried and convicted on terrorism charges stemming from his association with a government opposition group. His detention was later deemed illegal by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2021.

Rusesabagina was released from prison in 2023 after his 25-year sentence was commuted.

"I actually went to visit him in the prison there and was part of picking him up in the government cutter," Fayhee said. "And so, I sort of had developed this pro bono practice over the years."

Fayhee and other Akin team members, including Dallas-based counsel Ryan Anderson, have also worked pro bono with the family of Ryan Corbett, an American who ran a consulting and microfinance company in Kabul, Afghanistan, and was detained by the Taliban in 2022.

"We help keep the government on task, raise the profile, and really give support to the families who are dealing with an awful and highly complex and pretty devastating situation," Fayhee said of his pro bono efforts. "And then, ultimately, try to support those families moving forward to reintegrate them, as I'm doing literally as we speak with Paul Whelan, who I walked all over Capitol Hill with last week."

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