Heidy Sánchez brought her 17-month-old daughter to what she believed would be a routine immigration check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last April in Tampa, Fla. Instead, federal officers informed her that she was being detained and instructed her husband to come collect their daughter, who was still breastfeeding. Two days later, Ms. Sánchez, 44, a home health aide who had built a life in Florida, was deported.
Her case ricocheted across social media, partly because she is Cuban — a community that for decades enjoyed unique treatment under U.S. immigration law, even when people entered the country illegally. Under President Donald Trump, that long-standing assumption of protection has collapsed.
In 2025 alone, more than 1,600 Cubans have been repatriated, according to the Cuban government, roughly double the number deported in 2024. Over the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency, more Cubans have been sent back than under his three immediate predecessors combined. The increase has been especially sharp for Cubans deported by land through Mexico, including some who had lived in the United States for decades, raised families, paid taxes and operated businesses, only to be removed over old criminal convictions dating back to Miami’s cocaine cowboy era of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Nowhere has the shock been felt more intensely than in Florida, a state whose modern identity was shaped by exiles fleeing the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Communities that once believed themselves insulated from immigration enforcement are now confronting it directly. For many, the irony is hard to miss: voters who reliably backed Republican candidates and strongly supported Mr. Trump are increasingly finding themselves targeted by the very policies they applauded.
Deportation flights to Cuba began under President Barack Obama in January 2017, paused during the coronavirus pandemic and resumed in 2023. But under Mr. Trump, removals have accelerated dramatically. Many Cubans have also spent weeks or months detained in a remote Everglades facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” At another nearby detention center, Cuban detainees protested last June by writing “SOS Cuba” on their shirts and spelling out “SOS” with their bodies in the recreation yard.
Legal immigration pathways have also narrowed sharply. Mr. Trump enacted a travel ban on 19 countries, including Cuba, and ended a family reunification program. Visa applications, which already take years, are being rejected at higher rates. Last month, the administration paused all Cuban immigration cases, including pending naturalization, residency and asylum filings.
“It’s the most sweeping rollback of Cuban migration channels since the Cold War,” said María José Espinosa, the executive director of the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas, a Washington-based nonprofit.
Polling suggests that most Cuban American registered voters — who lean Republican — continue to support Mr. Trump, said Michael J. Bustamante, an associate history professor and director of Cuban studies at the University of Miami. But he added that he has observed “a growing amount of unease” across the community as the consequences of hard-line immigration policy become personal.
As a senator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump administration’s most prominent Cuban American official, often criticized Cuban immigrants who received government benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid and then returned to the island. Over the summer, Mr. Rubio said in a video commemorating the massive anti-Communist protests of 2021 that many Cubans had found it “easier” to “abandon” the island rather than remain and resist the regime.
While South Florida has not experienced mass federal raids on the scale of Los Angeles or Chicago, Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda has rattled Cubans unaccustomed to feeling vulnerable in the United States.
“I am scared of everything,” said Javier González, a 36-year-old salesman in Hialeah, a heavily Cuban city northwest of Miami.
Mr. González and his family crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in February 2022, fleeing what he described as threats to his life in Cuba, where he said he was a political dissident. Like hundreds of thousands of recent Cuban migrants, he and his wife were released under conditional parole, which does not allow them to apply for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 and leaves them exposed to deportation.
They legally obtained Social Security numbers, work permits and driver’s licenses. Mr. González applied for political asylum and has a court date scheduled for 2028. He found work as an HVAC technician and said Mr. Trump’s promise to deport criminals initially sounded reasonable to him.
That calculation changed when ICE officers began detaining Cubans with conditional parole during routine check-ins in South Florida. Now, Mr. González avoids unnecessary driving and steers clear of local Hispanic supermarkets to reduce the risk of encountering immigration enforcement. He fears the repercussions he could face in Cuba as a former dissident.
“Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Why do you have to feel as if you were a criminal when you are an upstanding person?’” Mr. González said. But, he added, “They can grab you and do whatever they want.”
Some older Cuban Americans, many of whom once championed strict immigration policies, are furious at the reversal of fortune. Alicia Peláez, 78, arrived in the United States in 1960 as an unaccompanied minor through Operation Pedro Pan, a secret program that resettled about 14,000 Cuban children.
“We were welcomed into the country,” said Ms. Peláez, a registered Republican who has not voted that way in recent elections. “Now, it’s the complete opposite.”
Ms. Sánchez, who was separated from her husband and infant daughter, remains in Havana with a pending visa interview that will determine whether she can apply for a waiver to return to Florida. She originally entered the United States through the southern border, requested asylum and waited in Mexico. She missed a hearing because of safety concerns, triggering a deportation order and nine months of detention. At the time, Cuba refused to accept her return, and she was released into the United States.
In Florida, she trained as a nursing assistant, married her husband — an American citizen who petitioned for her residency — and underwent fertility treatments before giving birth to their daughter. Three months before her deportation, the family bought a house.
After being sent back to Cuba, Ms. Sánchez said she became so distressed that she sought psychiatric care. Her daughter, still in Tampa, changed noticeably.
“She didn’t laugh anymore, which really worried us,” Ms. Sánchez said. Her husband and daughter visited her over Christmas, briefly easing the pain of separation. But the uncertainty remains overwhelming. Her daughter, she said, “is our joy, our happiness, our life.”
For many Cuban Americans who once loudly supported Mr. Trump’s tough stance on immigration, the unfolding deportations have become a bitter lesson. Policies cheered at rallies are now dismantling families, stripping legal status and forcing longtime Republican voters to confront a reality they never expected to apply to them.
