Cuban Migrants Are Thwarted in Mexico by New Asylum Rules

By Santiago Pérez

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—A surge of Cuban asylum seekers, long accustomed to preferential treatment under U.S. migration policies, are being stopped by U.S. government efforts to contain a tide of Central Americans migrating north.

Thousands of Cuban migrants have been stranded for months in violent towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to request asylum in the U.S. even as the Trump administration imposes more restrictions on asylum seekers.

In the first nine months of fiscal year 2019 ending in September, more than 16,100 Cuban migrants sought admission at U.S. ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. The surge more than doubles the number for the previous full fiscal year and is also above full-year 2017 levels.

Large groups of Cubans also have been stuck near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, as they wait for permits that allow them to continue their trek north. Thousands have been detained within Mexico. In the southern town of Tapachula, home to Mexico’s largest detention center, Cuban detainees have rioted and staged several escapes.

“This is a terrible moment for Cuban migrants. There’s desperation and alarm because of the latest measures,” said Yaimí González, a 41-year-old who fled Cuba three months ago.

Ms. González is a member of the Damas de Blanco, an opposition group founded by female relatives of jailed dissidents in Cuba. She is one of an estimated 5,000 Cuban migrants in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, who are on a waiting list for an asylum interview in the U.S.

Analysts say Cuban migration has spiked partly as a result of President Trump’s attempt to ratchet up economic pressure on the Cuban regime, worsening living conditions. A nascent Cuban private sector catering to U.S. tourists was hit hard by the Trump administration’s decision to ban U.S.-based cruise ships from traveling to Cuba and impose restrictions on sending remittances to the island.

“Economic conditions in Cuba have worsened a lot,” said Alejandro González Raga, a Cuban dissident who heads the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a Spain-based advocacy group. “The stampede is brutal.”

Cuban migrants historically were given privileged treatment as political refugees rather than economic migrants. Since the Cuban revolution in 1959, about 1.3 million Cubans have entered the U.S., many in massive immigration waves including the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which saw about 125,000 Cubans arrive on Florida shores on a flotilla of boats and rafts.

But that easy access gradually grew more difficult. In 1995, following another major wave of migrants fleeing Cuba on rafts, the Clinton administration changed the policy to repatriate migrants caught at sea but continued to allow Cubans who reached U.S. soil to gain easy entry. The policy was known as “wet-foot, dry-foot.”

In 2017, as part of a rapprochement with the Cuban regime, President Obama ended that policy.

In recent weeks, Cubans also have been caught up by a new U.S. government rule that makes it far harder for immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to even apply. The rule, currently being challenged in court, requires asylum seekers who pass through a third country to first apply for refugee status in that country rather than in the U.S.

“I just don’t see a solution to our situation,” said Ms. González, the Cuban dissident. She now sells french fries at a stand in Ciudad Juárez earning $10 a day, barely enough to pay for a guesthouse room that she shares with four Cuban male migrants.

Cubans go to great lengths to leave the island, traveling to countries like Guyana or Nicaragua, which have more flexible visa requirements for Cubans than other countries in the region. Then they work their way up to the U.S. overland, a trek that is longer than the journey for Central Americans and includes natural barriers like Panama’s dense Darién jungle.

More than 5,500 Cuban migrants have been detained by Mexican authorities so far this year, most of them near Mexico’s southern border, reaching levels not seen since 2015, government officials say. Cubans rank among the top four nationalities in apprehensions, after Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans.

In the southern town of Tapachula, close to 1,000 Cuban detainees rioted and more than 600 managed to escape in April, in one of several incidents involving Cuban migrants. More than 1,000 have been deported from Mexico so far this year, according to Cuban government estimates.

For those who make it to the U.S. border, they are being told to wait indefinitely in cities like Ciudad Juárez, one of Mexico’s most violent cities. Many live in decrepit guesthouses at the edge of the city’s underworld dominated by drug gangs, pimps and human smugglers known as coyotes.

Ciudad Juárez is also taking about half of the migrants returned to Mexico under a U.S. program informally known as Remain in Mexico. Mexican authorities estimate that around 12,000 people—most from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—have been sent back to Ciudad Juárez this year to wait for their U.S. asylum hearings. More than 300 Cubans have been returned in recent weeks to Ciudad Juárez under the program.

“Cubans didn’t expect to be returned like other migrants, and they are very hurt,” said the Rev. Jesús Mendoza, a Catholic priest who runs the church-backed Casa del Migrante, the largest shelter in Ciudad Juárez.

Daniselis Ferrer said her flight from Cuba turned into a nightmare when her travel companion, a fellow Cuban, became her abuser in Ciudad Juárez. Soon after arriving in late May, the shy 18-year-old said she was locked in a guesthouse room and abused for weeks by the older male from her hometown, Santiago de Cuba.

She was eventually released with the help of a relative living in the U.S. and a Cuban acquaintance also stranded in Ciudad Juárez, in late June. Local migration authorities in Mexico placed Ms. Ferrer high on the long waiting list of migrants seeking to request asylum in the U.S., so she could reunite with her relative in the U.S. as soon as possible.

But six days after she crossed the U.S. border, U.S. immigration officials sent her back to Ciudad Juárez in early July to await her court hearing. After returning, she said she was paralyzed with fear as her former captor was seen roaming the streets. Ms. Ferrer was taken in by volunteers at a shelter run by evangelical charities that house some 30 migrant women and children.

“I was hiding, in bed all the time,” she said.

Ms. Ferrer says she left Cuba for political reasons. She said she was sent to a correctional boarding school because her family refused to cooperate with the neighborhood Revolutionary Defense Committees in charge of detecting political dissent.

In her interview with U.S. authorities in June, Ms. Ferrer said she was so nervous that she struggled to answer basic questions like her day of arrival in Mexico. She was also reluctant to describe her ordeal to male officers.

“I then had a phone interview with a female officer, who said that she would try to help. But in the end I was told that all Cubans were ordered to go back to Mexico,” Ms. Ferrer said.

An official from the Department of Homeland Security said the agency doesn’t provide specific information about individual cases. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis and are dependent on the information available to the department.

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