Cubans Are Desperate Not to Be Deported to Cuba

“If they deport me, let it be anywhere but there.”

By Amado Viera

HAVANA TIMES – The same day that Cuban national Heydi Sanchez Tejeda was detained when attending her annual appointment at the ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) offices in Tampa, Yanier was supposed to attend his in Chicago. But on the afternoon of Monday, April 21, he received an email notifying him that his appointment had been postponed to an undetermined date.

Thus, his Tuesday unfolded like so many others: first, working a half shift at a frozen food factory; then, driving for hours for the Lyft app. “It wasn’t until the evening that I learned about that girl’s arrest and that they were threatening to deport her to Cuba. My wife and I were in shock. We are I-220A holders,” Yanier told me.

The rest of Heydi’s story is known in Cuban circles. Two days after her detention, she was sent back to Havana on a flight along with 81 other migrants. Neither the complaints from her husband, a Cuban-American with US citizenship, nor the fact that she had arrived in the US in 2020 and was leaving behind a one-year-old daughter could stop it.

For Yanier, the worst-case scenario would be for his story to have a similar ending. “My wife and I entered this country in October 2022, and from the very first day we were eligible, we started applying for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act. But we have always been denied. It’s like we’re living our lives on pause. We have plans, we even want to have children and become US citizens, but none of that is possible because we still can’t access residency. Biden never solved this issue, and with Trump, things have gotten even worse.”

Hope in the Courts

According to US government statistics, about 860,000 Cubans have entered the country since October 2021. Slightly more than 110,000 were admitted under the Humanitarian Parole Program, and a similar number entered using the CBP One digital application. Many minors traveled through lengthy family reunification processes or with humanitarian or academic visas.

But none of these pathways matched the massiveness of the so-called “border encounters” — the process by which, between October 2021 and January 2023, more than 500,000 Cubans crossed the Mexico–US border to surrender themselves to US immigration authorities. After spending a few days in detention centers, the vast majority were released (with only a few deported back to Cuba or Mexico), but the status under which they were released varied significantly.

A small percentage of migrants were issued humanitarian parole permits; meanwhile, the rest were given I-220A or I-220B forms, which are, respectively, orders of release on parole and release under supervision. The humanitarian parole document allowed thousands of Cubans to apply for and obtain permanent residency in the US, but holders of the other two forms have so far been denied that possibility.

US lawyers agree that the decision to grant one status or another was random. “There have been cases where a woman received one type of documentation while her husband received another,” emphasized El Nuevo Herald in March.

Before Heydi Sanchez’s case, other Cuban women had already encountered problems with ICE, signaling a worrying shift in policy by the authorities. “I’m seeing people with I-220A forms, no criminal records, and pending court hearings or residency applications being detained. It creates massive panic,” said attorney Wilfredo Allen. For many of those affected, the only hope lies in the judicial system, he noted.

The first step in that direction might have been taken by Judge Indira Talwani, from Massachusetts, who on April 15 temporarily halted the executive order canceling the Humanitarian Parole Program. The White House has already announced it will appeal the decision, but the event did not go unnoticed by legal representatives of thousands of Cuban and other nationalities’ migrants. Cuban migrants, in particular, hope to buy time to apply for the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows them to obtain residency after one year and one day of entering the US.

Returning—Where To?

With their income, Yanier and his wife support their parents in Cuba and help other family and friends. They’ve been doing so since they traveled to Spain in early 2022, and then a few months later to the United States. Their worst option would be to find themselves back in Havana.

“If they deport me, let it be anywhere but Cuba. It’s brutal to be sent back to a country where even electric service is a luxury, and where a retiree’s pension isn’t enough to buy even a carton of eggs,” Yanier told me. His wife added to the conversation by mentioning a surgery her father underwent a few months ago: “We even had to send the gloves for the doctors from here. We wouldn’t have been able to do any of that if we had stayed in Cuba,” she pointed out.

Others don’t even have anywhere to return to. The phrase “selling house with everything inside” became popular between 2022 and 2024 in Facebook business groups. Miguel Otaño, a construction worker from Ciego de Ávila (450 kilometers east of Havana), works on renovating a house that was sold under such conditions. “The current owner, who lives in the United States, bought it from a family that needed the money to emigrate. I heard they all entered the US with parole. Hopefully, they had enough time to get their residency, because otherwise, I don’t know where they’d go back to,” he commented.

Around 42,000 Cubans have deportation orders already approved by US courts. They have not yet been sent back to the island largely because the Miguel Diaz-Canel administration has been reluctant to accept mass deportation flights. However, “the regime continues using the reception of its citizens as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with the US.,” the digital outlet El Toque recently reminded. In a hypothetical negotiation scenario, Havana might not hesitate to accept migrants back as a way to  receive reciprocate “gestures” from Washington.

It’s a threat looming over thousands of Cubans trying to rebuild their lives in the United States. The story of Heydi Sanchez has made it clear that practically none of them are safe.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.