May Díaz was supposed to belong in America. As a Cuban who fled political persecution and joined spontaneous anti-government demonstrations in July 2021, she fit the historical profile of exactly the kind of refugee the United States had long welcomed from the communist island. When she crossed the Mexican border into Texas in October 2021, immigration officials processed her quickly under the privileged status Cubans had enjoyed for decades as Cold War defectors.
By March of this year, federal agents were showing up at her door.
Díaz, a 36-year-old musician from Camagüey, arrived during the Biden administration and was released on her own recognizance while awaiting asylum adjudication. She worked odd jobs in Texas and Florida for years without incident. But when Donald Trump returned to office and launched his aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants, her luck evaporated. In October, her asylum application was rejected. A month later, her work permit vanished. Then came the ICE agents.
She was not home when they knocked. But she is now, and the fear of that moment repeating itself has become her daily reality.
"There is no difference between a Cuban who is languishing in a prison cell on the island and a Cuban living here who has no possibility of finding a job," Díaz said, describing Trump's immigration policies as trampling on what America has always represented as a refuge for the vulnerable.
Díaz's case is far from isolated. Since Trump took office 17 months ago, the United States has deported nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics. That number more than doubles the 3,385 Cubans expelled during his entire first term between 2017 and 2021. Most have been left stranded on the Mexican side of the border, a fact that has left human rights organizations alarmed.
The Human Rights Watch organization released a report this spring documenting that many of the deported Cubans are elderly individuals with serious health conditions who had lived in the United States for years or decades. They land in Mexico with no shelter, no medication, and no legal pathway to stability outside of seeking asylum in a country already overwhelmed with migrants.
"The Mexican government is not offering them any way to obtain durable legal status outside of the asylum system, leaving many in limbo with no shelter, no medication, and at the mercy of criminal organizations," said Alcira Silva Hava of Human Rights Watch's refugee and human rights division.
The reversal is particularly striking because Cuban Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. An estimated 68 percent of registered Cuban American voters in Florida backed him, the strongest support he received from any Latino demographic in the country. Yet Trump has repaid that loyalty by treating Cuban immigrants as just another group to be expelled.
The shift reflects what Cuba experts say is Trump's fundamental priority: regime change in Havana matters more to him than preserving the traditional immigration pipeline from the island. The Cuban economy is collapsing under American sanctions, and people are fleeing. But Trump wants them to stay put and destabilize the government themselves rather than escape to Florida.
"Trump doesn't want more immigrants, but he does want regime change," said Susan Eckstein, professor emerita in the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and author of three books on Cuba. "He's been obsessed with being anti-immigrant, and Cubans are among the largest groups of foreign nationals who are coming into the US."
White House officials defend the deportations as routine enforcement of immigration law. They note that nearly 2,000 Cubans have been repatriated to an island facing military threats from Washington and an economy suffocating under a naval blockade. The administration's position is that it simply enforces the rules without exception.
Miami has become the epicenter of these deportations, leading the nation in expulsions since the start of this year. Three Republican Cuban American members of Congress representing the Miami area, María Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez, have dutifully supported Trump's immigration agenda. All three voted Tuesday for legislation channeling $70 billion to the Department of Homeland Security, funding that will triple ICE's annual budget through the end of Trump's current term. None of the three agreed to interviews about the deportations.
Salazar has occasionally broken from the White House on rhetoric, publicly urging the Department of Homeland Security to shield from deportation Cubans with pending cases and clean records, and to resume citizenship processing for Cuban applicants. But these calls have largely fallen on deaf ears as the deportation machine continues.
The question of whether Cuban American voters will respond by shifting their political allegiance appears to have a straightforward answer: probably not. While Trump's approval rating among this group has declined from 68 percent in the election to 53 percent now, the core of his Cuban American support remains as solid as it was two years ago, according to Eduardo Gamarra, a professor of political science at Florida International University and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum.
Author James Rodriguez: "The irony is cutting: the group that gave Trump his biggest Latino victory is now experiencing his harshest immigration enforcement, yet shows little sign of abandoning him."
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