Under Trump asylum policy, hundreds of Cubans remain locked up in US detention centers
Daniel Gonzalez
President Donald Trump carried Florida with help from Cuban American voters who support the Trump administration's hard stance against the communist regime in Cuba.
But under the Trump administration, hundreds of Cuban asylum seekers have languished in U.S. immigration detention centers in Arizona and other states during the coronavirus pandemic.
Some, such as Merlys Rodriguez Hernandez, a 29-year-old Cuban doctor, have remained locked up for more than a year, after fleeing the same authoritarian regimes Trump has railed against.
SEE THE WINNERS: Find out the Arizona election results here
Some critics say Trump pandered to Cuban American voters in Florida while turning his back on Cuban asylum seekers being held in detention centers in border states far from the Cuban-American political center in Miami-Dade County.
"We see the hypocrisy," said Mario H. Lopez, president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, a conservative Republican-leaning advocacy group. "It is sort of hollow to talk about socialism and socialism's ills, which we agree with, but then to not just ignore but inflict cruel punishment upon these refugees who are fleeing these socialist repressive regimes."
The Hispanic Leadership Fund ran bilingual digital audio ads in Florida leading up the election attacking Trump for saying he opposes socialism while failing to offer legal protections to people fleeing communist and socialist dictatorships, which included not only Cubans but also Venezuelans.
"Trump says he opposes socialism but he spurns those of us who escaped it," the voice of a woman says in the ad.
Trump's win in Florida, a big battleground state, was not enough. Joe Biden, Trump's Democratic rival, clinched victory Saturday in the presidential race.
While the majority of Latino voters in Florida supported Biden, politically important Cuban American voters favored Trump 55% to 42%, according to a Latino Decisions poll conducted in the days leading up to the election. Support from Cuban American voters helped Trump win Florida by a wider margin than in 2016.
For many Cuban American voters, Trump's tough stance against communist and socialist regimes, outweighed the Trump administration's treatment of migrants fleeing socialist dictatorships, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University who studies migration.
STAYING RED: See the Florida election results here
During the campaign, Trump attempted to paint Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris as socialists, which many Cuban American voters fear, Correa-Cabrera said.
"Those (Cuban Americans) who vote care about what is happening in the United States and they are not liking it, (U.S. Rep.) Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (a self-described supporter of democratic socialism) and all these people," Correa-Cabrera said. "They don't want to see that because that reminds them a little bit of the discourse on the island. They understand the difference, of course, but at the same time that really represents a threat."
At the same time, the Trump administration has taken a uniformly hard stance against a spike in migrants arriving at the southern border without documents and then asking for asylum, including Cubans, Correa-Cabrera said.
Detained doctor alleges mistreatment
Rodriguez Hernandez, the Cuban doctor, spent 13 months inside the Eloy Detention Center about 60 miles south of Phoenix.
She estimated there were more than 100 other Cuban women locked up inside the same facility while she was there.
While detained, Rodriguez Hernandez said she was sickened with COVID-19 in June during a large coronavirus outbreak inside the facility.
Rodriguez Hernandez waged a prolonged legal battle for her release as the U.S. government tried to deport her, according to Kayleigh Yerdon, a third-year law student in the Cornell Law Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic, which represented Rodriguez Hernandez pro bono in her bond proceedings.
Rodriguez Hernandez said she fled Cuba in July 2019. She and her husband, a radiology technician, left after they were stripped of their medical licenses by the Cuban government for speaking out against corruption that she said they witnessed in a Cuban medical mission program that sends doctors to work in Venezuela and other countries.
DIVE IN: Guard at Eloy Detention Center may have died of COVID-19 as coronavirus cases at facility soar
While working as a doctor in Venezuela as part of the Cuban medical mission program, she said she was forced by her Cuban bosses to falsify statistics and to deny medical treatment to Venezuelans who did not support the socialist regime of Venezuela's President Nicholas Maduro.
Rodriguez Hernandez said she and her husband decided to flee after they were repeatedly harassed and intimidated by Cuban government officials after being sent back to Cuba.
In an interview, Rodriguez Hernandez said she feared for her life.
After obtaining one-week tourist visas from the Cuban government, the couple flew to Nicaragua and then traveled through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, sometimes on foot and on horseback. In Mexico, near the border with Guatemala, she said the couple was attacked and robbed.
After traveling through Mexico by bus, the couple turned themselves over to U.S. immigration officials at the border crossing in Nogales, Arizona, on Christmas Eve, 2019. They asked for asylum after waiting in Mexico for a month and a half for their number to be called under a policy that restricts the number of asylum seekers allowed into the ports daily.
Rodriguez Hernandez said she thought she would be welcomed by the U.S. because the Trump administration has blasted the Cuban medical mission program as a modern form of slavery.
Instead, she felt betrayed by her treatment inside the Eloy Detention Center where she was taken after presenting herself to immigration officials.
"The United States is the only country that is always speaking out against this (Cuban) government," Rodriguez Hernandez said.
"It's also the only country that has requested that these medical missions end and has classified these medical missions as a modern slavery, so I thought this was the country that would give me the protection that I need," Rodriguez Hernandez said. "But that is completely the opposite of what I found in Eloy."
While held at the Eloy Detention Center. she said she was served poor food, had to clean her own cell, was deprived of enough soap, received inadequate medical care and was mistreated by correctional officers
ICE officials and CoreCivic, the company that owns and operated the Eloy Detention Center, strongly denied the allegations.
The correctional officers, Rodriguez Hernandez said, told her, "Don't worry. You aren't going to die" after she became sickened with diarrhea, headaches, fever, abdominal pain, body aches and other COVID-19 symptoms.
She said she was allowed to leave her cell only for 20 minutes daily while being held in medical isolation for 49 days after she tested positive for COVID-19.
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Rodriguez Hernandez was released from the Eloy Detention Center on Oct. 29 after was granted a bond hearing and posted a $10,000 bond. Her husband was held in the La Palma Correctional Center, a separate immigration detention center also located in Eloy. He was released from La Palma in June.
The couple is now living with a relative in Hialeah, a city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, while they await the outcome of their immigration cases.
ICE spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe confirmed Rodriguez Hernandez was diagnosed with COVID-19 in June. She "made a full recovery," Pitts O'Keefe said in a written statement.
ICE detains individuals while their cases move through immigration courts or to remove them from the U.S., the statement said. Groups of detainees are isolated in housing units from other detainees after they have been exposed to COVID-19, she said. She said ICE follows national performance-based standards and protocols when placing immigrants in detention.
CoreCivic spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist provided statements contained in court filings by Fred Figueroa, the Eloy warden, that disputed one-by-one the allegations made by Rodriguez Hernandez, calling them false.
The warden's statements said Rodriguez was served nutritious meals, given soap regularly, and provided adequate sanitation supplies.
In addition, Gilchrist said CoreCivic has a "zero tolerance policy for all forms of harassment" of detainees and "every allegation" of mistreatment is reported to ICE and investigated fully.
Medical health care at the Eloy Detention Center is provided by ICE Health Services Corps staff, not CoreCivic, Gilchrist said.
A closer look at US-Cuba policies
For decades, waves of Cuban migrants arriving in the U.S. have received special treatment under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows them to apply for lawful permanent residency one year after their arrival.
A 1995 revision of the application of the act allowed Cubans who touched U.S. soil to be paroled into the U.S. and then apply for green cards.
That "wet-foot dry-foot" policy resulted in an increase in Cuban migrants traveling through Central America and Mexico to reach the southern border of the U.S. instead of trying to reach Florida by boat.
The Cuban Adjustment Act remains law, but former President Barack Obama ended the wet-foot, dry-foot policy days before leaving office in 2017 as part of efforts to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations.
As part of the renewed relations with the U.S., Cuba began accepting deportees from the U.S. after refusing to accept them for years.
The Trump administration reversed some of Obama's normalization measures, including cutting off most communication with Cuba.
But the Trump administration has not brought back the wet-foot, dry-foot policy, according to a Wilson Center summary of U.S. immigration policy towards Cuba.
As a result, Cuban migrants who arrive at the southern border without documents now face deportation or prolonged detention. The Trump administration says the policy is aimed at deterring unlawful migration from Cuba to the U.S.
The number of Cuban migrants arriving at the southern border tripled from 7,079 in fiscal year 2018 to 21,499 in fiscal year 2019, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Meanwhile, the backlog of Cuban migrants in federal immigration courts has soared 347 percent, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The number of Cubans in deportation proceedings and the number of Cubans deported have also increased under the Trump administration, according to NBC News, citing TRAC data.
But in February, Cuba stopped accepting deportees amid the coronavirus pandemic, and under the Trump administration, hundreds of Cubans facing deportation continued to be detained by ICE in the U.S., according to the American Immigration Council's Immigration Impact website.
ICE did not immediately respond to requests for data on the number of Cubans currently being detained in ICE custody.
As of late September, 1,805 Cubans were in ICE custody, which was 9% of the detained population, Immigration Impact said, citing data obtained by Newsy. Some had been detained over two years, according to Immigration Impact.
Under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, ICE cannot detain people indefinitely and should not detain immigrants with final removal orders for more than six months
ICE data obtained by WLRN 91.3, a news radio station in Miami, showed the number of Cubans detained in ICE custody soared after Trump took office, from 1,271 in the final fiscal year of the Obama administration, to 8,514 in fiscal year 2018, a 700 percent increase.
Not much outcry over treatment
Cuban American advocacy groups and Cuban American elected officials, meanwhile, have remained relatively quiet about treatment Cuban migrants under the Trump administration, said Michael Bustamonta history professor at Florida International University who studies Cuban-American relations.
Except for a few high-profile cases involving well-known Cuban political dissidents, "you don't hear a kind of a general sort of cry, a preoccupation for the plight of Cuban migrants in general, many of whom are having a tough time passing that that very high bar that it takes to get formal asylum, which is now really their only option," Bustamante said.
Unlike previous waves of Cuban migrants who arrived by boat in Florida, many Cuban Americans in Florida likely remain unaware of the plight of Cuban migrants locked up in detention centers in Arizona and other border states, Bustamante said.
"It's not as if people are in detention facilities outside the city of Miami," Bustamante said.
There is also a sort of "harsh logic" among some Cuban Americans, including elected officials, that shutting the door on Cuban migration serves their goal of creating political pressure inside Cuba to overthrow the communist regime, he said.
"I think there has been kind of a quiet consensus that people can't state out loud because it would be a little shocking to hear that they don't want Cuban migration anymore," Bustamante said, "that migration is a safety value that allows the system in Cuba to survive."
Reach the reporter at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com or at 602-444-8312. Follow him on Twitter @azdangonzalez.
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