US Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden has been called out for dubbing Nicaragua's elected president "tyrannical" to score political points against President Donald Trump.
“Your deportations of politically persecuted Nicaraguans run counter to U.S. values and directly undermine the stated goals of U.S. policy towards Nicaragua,” the letter read.
It accused the government of “collaborating with the Ortega regime” after immigration authorities deported three individuals the Washington Post had previously identified as figures in the ongoing opposition attempts to bring down Ortega's Sandinista government.
Journalist Rania Khalek highlighted Biden's glib reference to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's "tyrannical grip" in a tweet on Sunday.
"Daniel Ortega is 'tyrannical'? What a joke. This word has no meaning anymore," Khalek wrote, adding that the word had come to mean 'leader that won’t do what the US wants'.
Other twitter users piled on to slam Biden for hypocrisy
Last month a leaked document from the US Agency for International Development laid out how the agency worked with the CIA to promote regime change in Nicaragua.
The Trump administration has met Nicaraguan protest leaders and slapped sanctions on the country, its police force, President Ortega and even his son.
In December 2018, Trump signed the Nicaragua Investment Conditionality Act into law, under which the US will use its veto with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to block any loans to the Central American nation.