By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on March 27, 2025
Trump decided that immigrants are the number one enemy of the United States, but it has surprised everyone that the hunt has also extended to South Florida, where the president’s best friends are. For the first time in more than 60 years, hundreds of Cuban immigrants, many of them women with no criminal record, are queuing up at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Broward, fearing that they will not be able to return home.
Last week, 18 Cuban women were arrested at their scheduled immigration appointments and now face an uncertain deportation process. The signal is clear: for Cubans too, the time has come for the policy of pursuing and deporting, after decades of enjoying a privileged immigration status as part of a policy of punishment towards Havana. On the one hand, the US has stifled the Cuban economy to an unprecedented degree, and on the other it has opened the doors to emigration with all kinds of social benefits to blame the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel for its incapacity, in a perverse loop of pressures, accusations and political manipulations.
In January 2023, Biden implemented a humanitarian parole program presented as a legal, orderly and safe route for migration from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua. From Cuba alone, more than 110,000 people managed to enter the US through this program, while Washington tightened the screws of its policy of maximum pressure on Havana.
But last Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a document that has caused a legal and humanitarian earthquake: the suspension of parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
This leaves some 26,000 Cubans who entered the US after March 2024 in legal limbo. They are exposed to deportation, as they will not be able to avail themselves of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 if they have not spent more than a year in this country.
The Cuban Adjustment Act – which Fidel Castro called “murderous” – has historically encouraged illegal immigration by sea, on precarious rafts and in shark-infested waters. The law guarantees that any Cuban who enters the country, no matter how, will be able to obtain residency one year and one day after setting foot in the US. In 1995, under Bill Clinton, it became known as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which meant that any Cuban intercepted at sea (“wet foot”) was returned to the island, but those who managed to set foot on land (“dry foot”) could stay in the US, obtain a work permit and initial aid and, after a year, apply for permanent residence.
However, with Trump, the chances of Cubans who entered with humanitarian parole and have already spent more than a year in this country, getting residence remain to be seen.
According to CBS, a memorandum dated February 14 and signed by a senior Immigration Service official says that the “adjustment” cases of Cubans who have entered on humanitarian parole are, for now, “on hold” (https://acortar.link/uABnBB).
Cubans who have entered the country illegally are also on a tightrope. Previously, upon reaching the border, they would receive parole to get out of immigration detention and appear before a court. And after a year in the US, they would receive permanent residence (a green card).
To prevent these Cubans from qualifying for the Adjustment Act, Immigration has renamed the previous parole procedure I-220A, a kind of parole de facto, although not necessarily de jure. The immigration appeals court ruled that I-220A does not satisfy the parole condition that the Cuban would need to apply for residence, in accordance with the Adjustment Act.
This means that instead of being in line to receive a green card, Cubans have been moved to a waiting list to be deported from the US like any other undocumented person.
The Cuban community in Florida is experiencing a bitter awakening.
For years, many believed the siren songs of the Republican Party and enthusiastically supported figures like Trump, who today is betraying them without the slightest concealment.
The President has proposed not only the total suspension of parole, but even threatens to deny entry to Cubans who have visas and has declared war not only on migrants, but on their defenders: lawyers, the media, universities and any institution that provides support or protection. He seeks to sow fear and demobilization. Silence and obedience.
What is exposed is not only the legal fragility of thousands of people, but the profound ethical inconsistency of a system that uses human beings as political instruments. In the end, Cubans are also everything Trump needs to cultivate the new immigrant holocaust: they come from abroad, they speak Spanish and in the president’s eyes they are inferior beings, with “bad genes”, no matter how much they may have paid homage to him at the ballot box in Miami.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoaemericano – English