Cuban Deportees Stranded in Mexico After US Policy Shift

Palenque, Mexico – In a gloomy house tucked in a dead-end street in southern Mexico, three Cuban men wait out their days watching Hollywood movies, playing dominoes and pooling their change to buy food.

Ricardo Scull Delgado, Ernesto Perez Chapman and Lazaro Diaz Garcia have been stuck there since December.

All three are in their 70s. All three arrived in the United States in 1980, as part of an exodus of refugees fleeing hardship and repression in Cuba.

And all three were expelled from the country last year as part of President Donald Trump's push for mass deportation.

They were piled onto a bus in Arizona and driven south for three days straight until they reached Palenque, a town close to Mexico's border with Guatemala.

“When we arrived in Palenque, it was pouring with rain, and they just kicked us out of the bus onto the curb,” Scull Delgado, 71, said. “The cruelty was unbelievable, so inhumane."

Of all the deportees sent to Mexico, Cubans represent the largest third-country population. More than 4,000 Cuban citizens have been deported from the US to Mexico since Trump took office for a second term.

But that mass expulsion signals a reversal in US policy. After decades of sheltering Cubans in exile, critics say the US is now leaving them in limbo abroad, with no means of supporting themselves.

“Our deportation wasn't legal,” said Scull Delgado. “But this Trump guy thinks he can do whatever he wants and has an agreement with the Mexican government.”

“They’ve taken everything away from me, for all the years I was working. Everything.”

'Like we were dogs'

For Scull Delgado, life in the US began with the famous Mariel boatlift, a 1980 exodus that saw some 125,000 Cubans pile onto small, rickety boats and sail across the Florida Strait.

Many were fleeing political persecution. Others had grown desperate as a result of the island's economic strife. Scull Delgado said he joined the boatlift to escape service in Cuba's army.

But even though the "marielitos" arrived in the US without formal paperwork, Washington agreed to accept them. The US, after all, had long opposed the island's communist leadership.

"We will continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from communist domination and from economic deprivation," US President Jimmy Carter said at the time.

Over the following decades, Scull Delgado settled in California and got married to a US citizen. He had three children and four grandchildren. But he also got a criminal record.

"I committed a crime in the '90s," he said, describing it as "a slip-up" for which he did time in prison.

"After I got out, I didn’t get into any more problems," Scull Delgado added. He just had to "show up every year to sign in" at US immigration offices. "That’s where they picked me up."

Immigration agents arrested him while he was signing in at the office. After nearly 46 years in the US, he was one month away from retirement — one month away from enjoying "the benefits I earned through my work".

"I do feel betrayed by Trump because he took everything away from me after I’d spent my whole life in that country," Scull Delgado said.

By November, he had been transported to Mexico, away from his home and his family.

Another Cuban national, 48-year-old Orlando Martinez Mendoza, was also deported in 2025.

He migrated from Cuba to the US in 2015, arriving by boat. But he said immigration authorities grabbed him at a court hearing in Tennessee, where he had appeared for a speeding charge.

He described being transported to three different detention centres over the course of two months in Tennessee. He was then transported out of state, to a holding facility set up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola.

Martinez Mendoza remembers the transfer being staged for media purposes.

"They selected a group of us migrants, saying we were the biggest criminals in the country," he said. "They took us to Angola prison in a bus with police in front and back, stopping traffic with sirens, and TV cameras rolling."

Eventually, he too was sent to Arizona and, from there, to Palenque. He said his bus came to a stop right in front of the offices for the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, or COMAR.

Immigration officials, he said, "dumped us right in front of COMAR like we were dogs".

The US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees federal immigration enforcement, did not reply to a request for comment for this story.

It has, however, featured Martinez Mendoza on a website of its immigration-related arrests, highlighting his conviction for selling cocaine in 2018. He was subject to a deportation order after serving two years in prison.

'A clear violation'

Cuba has a history of rejecting deportees from the US, given the tense relations between the two countries. The US has accused Cuba of abuses, and Cuba has accused the US of meddling in its affairs.

Since 1962, the US has also imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, largely prohibiting trade and travel to and from the island.

The cross-strait tensions with Cuba have only risen since Trump returned to the White House in 2025.

In January, Trump cut off the transfer of Venezuelan oil and funds to Cuba.

Then, he announced a de facto oil blockade against the island, threatening tariffs on any country that provided it with fuel.

Past US administrations have allowed Cuban nationals to remain in the country, given that deportations back to the island were largely denied.

But the Trump administration has relied increasingly on third-country deportations, which involve sending foreign nationals to countries where they often have no ties. They may not even know the language.

That can leave deportees stranded in precarious situations. Alcira Silva Hava, a researcher with the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, authored a report last month describing the situation of Cuban deportees in Mexico.

She found that many were older Cubans, aged 55 and up, who had spent decades building a life in the US. They now found themselves in Mexico, a country they had never been to before, without access to healthcare or other essential services.

Her research also acknowledges that some of those deported were indeed subject to orders of removal from the US, usually following criminal convictions.

But, Hava explained, "those orders said Cuba, not Mexico". She believes the sudden reactivation of the removal orders — and the switch in destination — violated the detainees' right to appeal their deportations.

"Decades after their cases closed, the US government swapped in a different country and sent them to Mexico under an undisclosed arrangement, with no hearing and no chance to object. That's a clear violation of due process," Hava told Al Jazeera.

Her analysis estimated that 4,353 Cubans had been deported between the start of Trump's second term and March 2026.

Of that number, she said, some 27 percent had no criminal record at all. Another 16 percent had pending charges and never saw their day in court.

A mysterious agreement

But the total number of Cubans deported to Mexico may be even higher, according to the US government's own statements.

In a document dated March 13, lawyers for the Trump administration told a Massachusetts federal court that "approximately 6,000 Cuban nationals" had been removed to Mexico in the last year.

It added that "Mexico has a standing (unwritten) agreement with the United States to accept Cuban Nationals for Removal".

The judge in the case, William Young, expressed astonishment at the revelation.

"What? Can this be true?" Young asked in a March 25 court order, temporarily halting the deportation of a Cuban man scheduled to be transferred to Mexico.

Young demanded that the US government provide more details to ensure that the deportee's due process rights were respected. He also questioned the secrecy surrounding the US-Mexico deal.

"The Court needs to know everything there is to know about this so-called 'unwritten agreement,'" Young wrote, listing off the questions he had. "What procedures, if any, were followed for these 6,000 folks?"

So far, the Trump administration has not made public any deportation deal with Mexico, though it has arranged such agreements with more than 30 countries, including El Salvador and Eswatini.

The Mexican government, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied signing onto a deportation deal with the US.

But there has been growing concern about Cubans being deported from the US, particularly in south Florida, which boasts a large Cuban American community.

One of the Congress members for the area, Republican Maria Elvira Salazar, has expressed concern that Cubans with no criminal records are being swept up in Trump's deportation push.

In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security this month, she pointed out that many Cuban nationals live in the US "in legal limbo", without a clear path to residency.

"Due to the escalating crisis in Cuba and the need for clarity and stability for Cuban families here, I urge your department to prioritize this issue," Salazar wrote.

She noted that a previous letter to the Trump administration had gone unanswered.

Stuck in Mexico

Back in Palenque, Scull Delgado and his fellow Cubans wait for Mexico to grant them asylum.

Only when their application is approved will they be entitled to residency in Mexico, with access to work rights and healthcare.

But for the moment, they cannot work or even access the local banking system. They rely on the generosity of strangers to feed and shelter them. The money they receive from family back in the US is barely enough to meet their daily costs of living.

Scull Delgado described his life as being "completely torn apart".

"[Trump] separated me from my wife. He separated me from the people I love, my whole neighbourhood, everything," said Scull Delgado. "I’m still paying for something I did more than 30 years ago. And that, I think, isn’t fair."

The men explained they are required to check in once a week at the local asylum office. "We go and line up and sign in every Tuesday," said Perez Chapman, one of Scull Delgado's roommates.

Several of the Cuban men expressed hope that they could return to their homes in the US once Trump is out of office.

"We’ve been made an example of," said Martinez Mendoza, the deportee who was held in Angola.

"I think we have to wait until the next election when he’s voted out."