Cubans’ border welcome warmer
Migrants seeing benefit from US immigration chaos
EAGLE PASS, Texas — A smile spread over the face of Yoima Paisan-viltre, a Cuban migrant, after passage over the emerald waters of the Rio Grande and through release by U.S. border guards. A bandana with the red, white and blue of the U.S. flag held her curly black hair.
“I can hardly believe it. I have arrived,” she squealed.
Arrival was in a small border town of 29,000 on the Rio Grande that’s morphed into one of the biggest venues for attempted entry into the United States. Paisan-viltre was one of the lucky migrants. This thinly populated Texas border region is the top route in for Cubans.
The current exodus from the island nation likely will exceed the historic 1980 Mariel boatlift.
About 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. then. Through May this fiscal year, about 140,000 Cubans have been caught by federal immigration agents — at a time of overall high migration not seen in more than two decades.
They typically make passage with flights to Nicaragua, which loosened visa requirements. Then they travel by land through two more Central American countries and into Mexico.
The vast majority — nearly 98% — have not been expelled quickly under the controversial public health order known as Title 42. Instead, they’ve been allowed entry into the U.S. and either receive humanitarian parole or will face immigration judges where they can launch a defense for staying.
Their treatment illustrates the deep chaos of a system
governed by law, policy memos, court injunctions — and diplomatic relations that can snag all the above.
Paisan-viltre views it in simple terms of liberty and love. She came for liberty, she said, and the need to put the economic collapse of her native land behind her. Her husband made his way to Houston ahead of her, she said, proudly showing a photo of him on her cellphone.
The arrival of so many Cubans now is the result of a cluster of economic and geopolitical forces.
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Dr. Michael Bustamante, a Cuban historian at the University of Miami. “For starters, Cuba is in the midst of its worst economic crisis in 30 years. That crisis predates COVID. That was made a lot worse by it for an economy that depends
as much as Cuba’s does on something like tourism.”
Key to the increasing numbers are the politics of the region. Nicaragua, a political ally of Havana, said Cubans could come into their country without a visa last November.
“All of a sudden, Cubans had a closer point of visa free access to the mainland Americas ... from which they could begin a journey north,” Bustamante said.
Many Cubans are processed and released into the U.S. with humanitarian parole, which is part of immigration law rather than Title 42 public health law. Humanitarian parole would put Cubans on a path to legal residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a feature within the complicated immigration laws. But Cubans are clearly averting a Title 42 expulsion that
usually comes within hours of arrival across the Rio Grande.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesman said he had no statistics on how many Cubans actually received humanitarian parole.
Another CBP spokesman said the light use of Title 42 may be limited for several reasons, including “Mexico’s capacity to receive those individuals.”
Sending Cubans back to Cuba under Title 42 isn’t an easy option, migration experts note.
“We don’t have full diplomatic relations with Cuba,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former DHS official who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations from 2005 to 2011 and is now at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “And we need to be able to work with those
governments to accept their people back. We can’t just randomly fly people into a country... They have sovereignty, too. And so we have to be able to work with the government to accept their people back.”
Cardinal Brown said she hasn’t seen this much chaos in immigration policy before. In 2000, immigration arrests by the Border Patrol reached about 200,000 or more a month — like recent months at the southwest border, according to CBP. Unaccompanied minors, traveling without a parent or legal guardian, have a specific policy for them, for example.
“What you can actually do is determined more day to day by what the latest court decision or injunction,” she said, noting that a new court decision provides stronger protections for migrant families with fears of violence.
“None of these migration phenomenons is a product of one single thing, right? It’s the product of a sequence of things. And that also means that there’s not a single solution.”
Chaos for some is an opportunity for Cubans, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C. nonprofit.
“It’s the least risky time in modern memory,” he said. “Even the Mariel boatlift was more dangerous.”
But the disparate treatment of migrants can be seen starkly by crossing the river from Eagle Pass into Mexico. Many from El Salvador and Honduras can be found in the streets of its cross-border sister city, Piedras Negras, where they have been expelled under Title 42.