"Nicaragua? C’mon. Is that a buzzword now?"

In blasting the unprecedented FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home this week, Florida Republican leaders revived a familiar theme: The targeting of a former president and political foe is something that could only happen in a “third-world country.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a rising star in the national Republican Party, said the scene was akin to one in a “banana republic,” a pejorative term that’s been historically used for some politically unstable countries in the Americas. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott said the search was “3rd World country stuff.” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio made a comparison to Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega jailing political opponents. U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar tweeted she was concerned about the U.S. going “down the path of countries like Cuba & Nicaragua.”

And Trump himself used the term in his statement confirming federal officials had been at his home, declaring the U.S. had already become “one of those Countries.”

“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before,” Trump said in a statement Monday. “They even broke into my safe!”

The ratcheted-up rhetoric about the search, in which the FBI seized about a dozen boxes of paperwork from Trump’s South Florida mansion, has had a particular resonance in Miami-Dade County. South Florida is home to thousands of residents who hail from countries where authoritarian leaders have been known to consolidate power by weaponizing judicial institutions against political enemies.

But where some saw a third-world-like attack on a former president they support, some exiles say they saw the opposite. To some, it was proof of a functioning system as the separation of powers made it possible for the feds to search Trump’s home.

Read more at the Tampa Bay Times