Cuban migrants sit on the floor while waiting to be processed. They were part of a group of about 40 who entered the next stage in their migration from Cuba to the United States on Jan. 4, 2023, when they were processed by the Border Patrol at the agency’s station in the Middle Florida Keys city of Marathon. (Carl Juste/TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — After a two-year hiatus marked by migration from Cuba of historic proportions, the Biden administration resumed deportation flights to Cuba on Monday under an agreement whose success has been questioned in the past.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, which handles security and migration matters, confirmed that a deportation flight Monday from the United States to Cuba was the first since December 29, 2020.
“The United States has a longstanding policy of removing to their country of origin all foreign nationals who lack a legal basis to stay in the United States. This policy applies to all non-citizens regardless of nationality, including Cuban nationals,” a Homeland Security spokesperson said.
“On April 24, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) resumed normal removals processing for Cuban nationals who have received final orders of removal,” the spokesperson said, adding that the deportations have “rigorous safeguards” to prevent those who could face persecution from being returned to their home country.
According to a Cuban Interior Ministry statement, 123 Cubans were returned to the island, of whom 83 had been detained at the U.S. border with Mexico, and 40 were “balseros” — rafters who had arrived on U.S. shores. The ministry said most came to the United States last year, but some had arrived in 2019 and 2021.
The U.S. Coast Guard routinely sends Cubans caught at sea trying to reach the United States back to the island. But the deportation flights were part of a deal cut by the Obama administration in January 2017. The flights stopped with the pandemic in 2020, and Cuba did not again agree to take Cuban nationals back despite the reopening of its airports.
In the meantime, a record number of Cubans came to the U.S. last year, more than 310,000, according to official records of “encounters” with Cuban migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The agreement was reached following bilateral talks in Washington earlier this month. After the meeting, the head of the Cuban delegation, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said his government expected to resume receiving the deportation flights soon.
While the resumption of the flights had been a priority for the Biden administration, the 2017 deal never accomplished the results U.S. officials expected during the years it was in place.
Under that agreement, any Cuban who entered the United States after January 2017 and has a final order of removal can be sent back to the island. Yet the majority of the 40,000 Cubans that immigration lawyers and activists estimate have final orders of removal had arrived before the 2017 deal. That agreement establishes that the Cuban government will consider taking back Cubans on that list on a case-by-case basis.
In several reports to Congress, State Department officials wrote that Cuba refused to take most nationals who entered the United States prior to 2017. Between April 2017 and July 2021, the Cuban government approved only 31 out of 5,998 cases that U.S. authorities put forward for removal in that category, according to a 2021 report on Cuban compliance with the migration accords sent by the State Department to Congress. The low approval rates even prompted visa sanctions on Cuban officials in 2019 and 2020.
Between January 2017 and July 2021, U.S. authorities deported 3,024 Cubans, according to the report.
Earlier this month, Fernandez de Cossío told the Associated Press that there was no agreement on the frequency of flights but that “there was no reason they can’t return to pre-pandemic levels of about twice a month.”
Since October last year, when ICE detained several Cubans and told them they were soon to be deported to the island — only to release them days later — there have been persistent signals that the two countries were discussing the flights. U.S. officials in November said Cuba had agreed to them, but it is unclear why they restarted several months later. Another attempt to restart the flights in December was halted after confidential information about several migrants, including the Cubans that were slated for deportation, was posted online by ICE accidentally and later inadvertently passed on to the Cuban government by a U.S. official.
Any Cuban who arrived after January 2017 and has a final removal order can be sent back to the island even if the person did not commit a crime in the U.S.. A memorandum issued by Homeland Security in 2021 to prioritize the deportation of migrants who had committed crimes has been contested in court, and it is not currently in force.
The Homeland Security spokesperson said ICE “makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis… considering the individual merits and factors of each case.” He added that the Cuban government has agreed to take no retaliatory action against those sent back to the island.
“U.S. officials assigned to our embassy in Havana are involved in monitoring this agreement to ensure compliance by the Cuban government,” the spokesman said.
But that monitoring has not happened in recent years. In 2020 and 2021, when the U.S. embassy in Havana had been operating with a skeleton staff, the State Department informed Congress that embassy officials had been unable to check on the returned migrants, either in person or by phone, according to the reports reviewed by the Herald.
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