They left Cuba seeking the American Dream. ICE sent them home in shackles

Exclusive by Patrick Oppmann, CNN

Havana, Cuba (CNN) — A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight returned 161 Cuban deportees to the communist-run island last week, the first time many of the men and women aboard had touched Cuban soil in years.

Upon arrival, the deportees had shackles removed from their wrists and ankles and one at a time descended the stairway of the chartered 767 aircraft to be reprocessed by waiting Cuban immigration and health officials. Some seemed visibly dazed to suddenly be back in their homeland.

According to Cuban officials, the flight had the largest number of deportees received to date – a further sign of the Trump administration’s determination to radically alter what until recently had been preferential immigration status afforded to Cubans.

Shortly after Fidel Castro took power and aligned his revolution with the Soviet Union, Cubans, for the most part, were treated by both Democrat and Republican administrations alike as political refugees – not immigrants – with a unique fast track to US residency.

Tens of thousands of Cubans who traveled to the US during the Biden administration expecting to be able to stay – as Cubans had for a generation – could now face possible deportation.

For much of the Cold War, Cubans leaving the island for the US were officially derided by Cuban leaders as “worms” or traitors to Castro’s revolution. As attitudes and official restrictions on travel slowly shifted, Cubans traveling abroad and returning – by their own accord or because they were deported – has become commonplace.

“They are Cuban,” Lt. Col Lourdes Gil Robaina, a Cuban immigration official told CNN, the first international television network to be allowed to witness how Cuban deportees are processed upon return to their country. “They go home, where their family is. They don’t have a problem with immigration to be reinserted into society.”

But many of the returning Cubans complained about their treatment by ICE officials –showing marks from the tight handcuffs on their wrists and told of dehumanizing lost weeks in an archipelago of detention centers.

“It’s a painful separation. I have conflicting feelings,” said deportee Tania Carbonell Cruz, who left behind three grown children – who also emigrated from Cuba – in Texas. She said her children, who had arrived in the US years ahead of her, were able to get residency while she missed the cut off so the family was now split. “My children are there and my husband is here,” she said.

After more than three years living in the US with her children, Carbonell said she was told by ICE she faced deportation and she quickly agreed to return rather than suffer a lengthy detention process.

“That president,” she said referring to Trump, “is getting rid off all the immigrants, from all the countries.”

‘They left behind my two-year-old daughter’

Another woman immediately began to sob loudly as she entered the small and threadbare Terminal Five in Havana’s José Martí’s International Airport, which has become the reprocessing center for the deportees returning on the monthly ICE flights.

“They left behind my two-year-old daughter. I lost her,” wailed Yudierquis Reyes Merino, who gave birth to a daughter conceived with another Cuban immigrant shortly after they crossed into the US from Mexico in 2022. “They told me the girl was American and could not leave the country.”

Reyes said she was detained by ICE officials in June in Nebraska, where she worked cleaning offices and meatpacking plants, during a routine check-in with immigration officials.

She said officials had told her she faced deportation because in 2023 she had pleaded no contest to a second-degree assault charge, for which a judge sentenced her to probation.

After weeks in ICE detention centers, Reyes said she agreed to be deported if she could bring her young daughter with her but ICE officials placed her on the plane without the girl.

In response to a CNN request for information about Reyes, a Department of Homeland security official responded by email:

“Yudierquis Reyes Merino, a criminal illegal alien (from) Cuba, crossed the border illegally in 2022 near Eagle Pass, Texas. She was previously charged with CHILD ABUSE, second-degree domestic assault, use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony. This CHILD ABUSER was removed to Cuba.

“In this case, the father – an(sic) US citizen – requested the child remain with him.

“Under President (Donald) Trump and (Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi) Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the US.”

But a CNN review of Reyes’ criminal history showed no record of any conviction for child abuse. As a result of the assault charge, Reyes had faced an additional charge of “Intentional Child Abuse No Injury” as her young daughter was in the house at the time of the incident.

Prosecutors in Nebraska dropped that charge after Reyes pleaded no contest to the assault, court records show.

When contacted by CNN, the father of Reyes’ daughter, said he was a US resident, not a US citizen as the DHS official had stated. He said even though he did not have legal custody of the girl, he told officials she should stay in the US with him and not go to Cuba.

“Life would be too hard for her there now,” the girl’s father, Miguel Camacho, told CNN in a phone interview. “It’s dangerous now.”

Lasting damage

Painful family separations are likely to become even more common for Cubans if the Trump administration plows ahead with plans to deport the thousands currently stuck in immigration limbo.

While the Cuban government has continued to accept monthly deportation flights even as the Trump administration rachets up economic sanctions on the island –perhaps as a way to keep one of the few remaining lines of communication to Washington open – officials in Havana dismiss the possibility of accepting tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of their citizens back.

“The issue is the US law – the decision by the US government in the 1960s to use the immigration factor as a political weapon against the Cuban revolution has now created this reality,” said Cuban Foreign Ministry official Alejandro Garcia del Toro. “For decades the policy was to incite, to urge Cubans to abandon their country. All of a sudden, the US has changed the whole policy.”

For deportees like Yudierquis Reyes the lasting damage is already done.

Interviewed at the home of relatives in central Cuba, following her reprocessing, Reyes said she had to live with family members since she had sold her home to finance her journey to the US.

She had spent the day unsuccessfully trying to speak with her daughter via a video call, unable to coax her to come to the phone; her daughter did not believe it was her mother calling.

Recounting how she had crossed the Darien Gap, evaded kidnappers in Mexico and ridden atop the infamous migrant “train of death” in that country to reach the US, Reyes swore to endure the danger-ridden journey all over again to be reunited with her daughter.

“Donald Trump only has three years left, I have the rest of my life,” Reyes said. “I will go and get her. I don’t care if they give me 20 years in jail.”

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