US Policies toward Cubans Harden, and the Human Toll Is Harder to Ignore
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As the U.S. government tightens the screws on both Cuba’s economy and the status of half a million Cubans in the United States, the nationality finds itself in an unprecedented predicament. Cuban American lawmakers are leading the charge. Secretary Marco Rubio and U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone both made comments this week likening Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants to criminals, greasing the wheels for increased detentions and deportations, and a slamming of the door that once welcomed the families of Rubio, Claver-Carone, and Gimenez. The crackdown on Cuban immigrants coincides with the existing limiting of trade, travel, remittances, and diplomatic exchange with the island. Cuban-born Representative Carlos Gimenez wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asking the Trump Administration to end all remittances and ban travel to and from Cuba with limited exemptions.
8 million Cubans on the island expect their already-precarious economic situation to worsen drastically in the coming months, and half a million Cubans living in the United States irregularly are facing uncertainty and a looming fear of detention. Which begs the question: What exactly are Cubans supposed to do?
This week, we spoke with Rachel Pereda, a Cuban writer and mother whose journey illustrates the cost of these policies at the most personal level. After facing harassment in Cuba for her journalism, Rachel traversed Central America with her young children to reach the US. Her writing now centers on migration, motherhood, and the social impacts of policy. She told us: “Leaving your homeland, your home, your people—no one does that for fun, especially not the way we had to. But I reached a point where I understood that if I wanted a different future for my children, I had to take a different path.” Her family received residency through the Cuban Adjustment Act—no longer an infallible option for Cubans migrating to the US.
She lamented the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who arrived in the US like her family, but were not afforded regular status. “Many—like our friends with I-220A status, good and professional people with important jobs who contribute to this country, or those who came through humanitarian parole or the CBP One appointments—still haven’t been able to adjust their status. I want them to feel what I felt when I finally saw our faces on a green card, knowing that we had walked a road full of sacrifices, but that a more secure and stable future was finally opening up before us.” Read her full interview here.
How many Cubans in the US are in legal limbo?
More than 600,000, including:
Over 500,000 Cubans who were released into the US with I-220A forms, incident reports, bonds, orders of supervision, or were processed through the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In 2023, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that Cubans who were issued I-220As could not use the Cuban Adjustment Act to obtain residency.
110,900 Cubans who legally entered the country via the Cuban Haitian Nicaraguan Venezuelan (CHNV) Parole program, who could be at risk of detention and deportation if their status is revoked by the Trump Administration.
The deportation of half a million Cubans is unlikely—but multiple cases of detention of Cubans with I-220A paperwork, plus a viral video of a Cuban man abducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while taking his trash out, have struck a paralyzing fear throughout a community accustomed to regular immigration status. A number of Cubans in limbo would be at political and personal risk if they returned to Cuba. After entering the US legally with his wife on June 5, 2024, independent journalist and activist Lázaro Yuri Valle, a beneficiary of the CHNV Parole program, received a notice informing him that he must leave the country by April 25 due to the end of the CHNV Parole program.
How have the courts responded?
Yesterday, on April 10, 2025, federal judge Indira Talwani said she planned to halt the Trump Administration from ending the CHNV Parole Program. The program benefitted 110,900 Cubans, who arrived with financial sponsors and were given two-year permits to live and work in the US. The parole status was temporary, and during that time, the parolees needed to find other legal pathways if they wanted to stay in the country. The Trump Administration announced an early end to the parole status–April 24, 2025–no matter when the beneficiaries entered the country and when their parole officially expired.
In September 2023, the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals decided that thousands of recent Cuban arrivals who entered the US through the US-Mexico border and were released with an I-220A immigration document were ineligible to receive permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA). The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act permits Cubans who enter the US legally to apply for permanent residency after a year and a day of living in the country. The ruling dictated that entering the US with an I-220A document, or Order of Release on Recognizance, failed to meet the requisite criteria for adjustment of status under the CAA of having been “inspected, admitted, or paroled” to the United States. The I-220A document is a conditional parole commonly issued by ICE which allows persons placed in removal proceedings, seeking asylum, or otherwise under federal custody to be released if they comply with certain conditions. According to the court’s ruling, entering on conditional parole, as with the I-220A document, does not constitute legal entry and cannot be considered a parole for purposes of residency, such as humanitarian parole, which therefore precludes adjustment of status under the CAA. Florida-based attorney Wilfredo Allen said that the ruling would have a “draconian impact” on similar cases.
How have policy-makers responded?
This week, on Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast Triggered, Secretary of State Marco Rubio harkened back to the 1930s American Isolationist Movement when he argued that recent immigrants have been “weaponized against America.” He compared the hundreds of thousands of Cubans and Venezuelans seeking regularization in the US to mental patients and criminals. “It’s not unprecedented. In 1980, Fidel Castro opened up his mental institutions, he opened up his jails, and he basically flooded the United States with criminals from Cuba, and we paid an extraordinary price for it…So there’s no doubt that this was a concerted effort by the Maduro regime not just to drive these gang members out of their country but to drive them towards the United States and to inflict a price on this country…it’s right out of the Fidel Castro playbook.”
On the Trump Administration’s simultaneous maximum pressure campaign against Cuba, U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone, a Cuban American himself, told an audience in Miami: “What we’re seeing today with the Tren de Aragua is the same as what Fidel Castro did with Mariel–filling the United States with a bunch of criminals for [Castro’s] advantage.” Claver-Carone told the audience that Ronald Reagan wasn’t tough enough in sending the “criminals” back. “In the short term, there are things that may seem upsetting or disruptive. But honestly, if you don’t do it, it doesn’t work. So we have to be all in, go big, or go home.” Historian Michael Bustamante noted that the labeling entire populations as gang members, Claver-Carone and Rubio revive the “old canard about Mariel "criminals" (an echo of the escoria label they received in Havana) as similar to Venezuelan ‘Tren de Aragua’ ‘infiltration problem’ today.” Bustamante, who serves as Associate Professor of History and the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, notes that the percentage of migrants with criminal records is far less that is being claimed, and “the false equivalency today is worse, as are the consequences.”
Representative María Elvira Salazar (FL-27) announced she is working on a bill to allow Cubans with I-220A to adjust their status. She has been extremely vocal about blaming President Joe Biden for the plight of Cubans with I-220A—though some Cuban activists aren’t convinced by her words. Human rights advocate and entrepreneur, Saily Gonzalez Velazquez accused Rep. Salazar of continuing to blame President Biden to cover for President Donald Trump’s disdain “toward the community you swore would not be in danger during his term…The community who voted for you…is waiting for action.” Critics argue that new legislation isn’t needed. Instead, they believe lawmakers should coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to recognize I-220A as a form of parole. In January 2024, Rep. Salazar, along with Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Rep. Morgan McGarvey, wrote a letter to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas encouraging DHS to issue a “Parole in Place” (PIP) to all Cuban arrivals to the United States who have received an I-220A form.
In December 2023, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas requesting ICE, CBP and USCIS to issue retroactive parole documentation to Cubans to allow them to adjust under the Cuban Adjustment Act.
How did this happen?
After President Barack Obama ended the “wet-foot-dry-foot” policy in January 2017, DHS no longer automatically granted parole to Cubans arriving at U.S. borders based solely on their nationality—limiting the number of Cubans eligible to adjust under the Cuban Adjustment Act. The record-breaking number of Cubans who arrived in the US after 2017 now have a number of different statuses, and the vast majority remain in legal limbo.
This week in Cuba news….
Federal Judge Slated to Block Trump Administration’s End of the CHNV Parole Program
A federal judge in Boston announced she will block the Biden administration from ending a humanitarian parole program that allowed over 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to temporarily live and work in the US. The Trump Administration had planned to strip parole status from CHNV beneficiaries on April 24, potentially leaving thousands at risk of detention and deportation. While the Department of Homeland Security defended the termination as lawful and within its authority, immigrant advocates call it “unprecedented” and “contrary to law.” In a previous statement, our Executive Director María José Espinosa noted that the proposed ending the CHNV program “is not just cruel—it’s counterproductive to the stated policy of the U.S. administration to curb irregular migration into the United States.” If the judge’s ruling stands, it means that CHNV parolees will still need to find alternate avenues to stay in the US regularly–but their status will not be revoked on April 24, rather, it will terminate two years after they were granted parole.
Rep. Giménez Urges Trump Administration to Halt All Travel and Remittances to Cuba
On April 2, Representative Carlos Giménez (FL-28) formally wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asking the Trump Administration to end all remittances and ban travel to and from Cuba with limited exemptions. He claimed that the majority of remittances end up in the hands of the “murderous dictatorship in Cuba” and urged Mr. Bessent to explore additional measures to block the flow of funds to the regime. Notably, no other Members of Congress signed onto the letter.
In a statement to Fox News, Rep. Giménez said: "So these are efforts to basically starve the regime. A lot of times when flights are going from Miami to Cuba, a lot of those people are taking goods and products, et cetera…The regime can't even provide electricity to their own people. It needs to fail on its own weight; America can't provide any more oxygen to that regime."
U.S. Food, Agriculture and Humanitarian Aid Exports to Cuba Surge, Exempted from the U.S. Embargo on Cuba
According to a new report by the U.S.–Cuba Trade and Economic Council, in February 2025, U.S. exports of food and agricultural products to Cuba rose by 75.1 percent, reaching over $47.6 million compared to $27.2 million in February 2024. This marks a continued upward trend, with Cuba ranking 44th among 212 agricultural/food export markets. The increase comes amid ongoing humanitarian needs on the island. February 2025 also saw $7.4 million in humanitarian donations and nearly $20,000 in healthcare product exports. A wide range of U.S. exporters, primarily based in Florida and Georgia, have contributed to this growth, including companies shipping poultry, bovine, and other foodstuffs. These rising exports align with trade channels established under Obama-era policies and underscore Cuba’s ongoing reliance on U.S. food and humanitarian shipments despite broader political tensions.
Senators Visit Guantánamo Naval Base
On March 28, a congressional delegation traveled to Cuba to investigate the legality and treatment of migrants held at the Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay. The group included four Democratic Senators—Jack Reed (RI), Alex Padilla (CA), Gary Peters (MI), and Jeanne Shaheen (NH)—and one Independent, Senator Angus King (I-ME). The delegation was led by Sen. Reed, Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the time of their visit, there were 87 migrants held at the facility, 42 of them considered “low risk.” Additionally, the 17 people the US sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador were Salvadoran and Venezuelan nationals who were sent there from Guantánamo Bay.
Shortly after their visit, the Senators issued a statement calling the facility a waste of taxpayer dollars and a misuse of military resources. They stated: “The migrant relocation operation at Guantanamo Bay is unsustainably expensive, operating under questionable legal authority, and harmful to our military readiness.”
According to The New York Times, during its first month of operations, the Guantánamo Bay Migrant Detention Center cost an estimated $40 million and employed 1,000 government workers—despite housing only 395 immigrants. Roughly half of the migrants who were taken to the facility were returned to detention facilities in the US with no explanation.
Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Visits Cuba to Strengthen Ties
On April 4, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Chernyshenko arrived in Santiago, Cuba to co-chair the 22nd Meeting of the Russian–Cuban Intergovernmental Commission for Economic, Commercial, and Scientific–Technical Cooperation. His visit also coincides with the 65th anniversary of the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between Russia and Cuba. The visit culminated in the signing of a new series of bilateral agreements including sectors such as health and medical education, science, higher education, land use planning and urban planning, geodesy and cartography, land registry, and artificial intelligence.
During the visit, Mr. Chernyshenko reported that Russia had approved a loan to Cuba for 100,000 tons of oil, a deal that was announced in November. He noted that work is progressing on 12 joint investment projects, and that Russia continues to provide humanitarian aid to the island.
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