Cuban detainees claim ICE forced them to sign forms saying they wanted to go back

MIAMI — When a guard approached his bunk bed asking if he’d like to see his family after 18 months in detention, the 24-yearold Cuban detainee thought he was finally going to South Florida where he’d be reunited with his aunt.

Instead, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had other notions. They were planning to reunite him with his family — in Cuba.

Now he’s one of at least two dozen Cubans inside detention centers in Louisiana and Georgia who have told the Miami Herald that ICE agents coerced them — sometimes through physical violence — to sign a form saying they desired to return to Cuba to visit family. The form has long been used by people traveling legally to the island under U.S. embargo restrictions that began in the 1960s.

For Cuban detainees, though, those “family visit” forms are a fig leaf used to justify hasty, permanent deportations, immigration policy experts say.

The detainees, 26 in all, told the Herald that if they declined to sign the travel documents, agents handcuffed them, pushed them against a table and forcibly scanned their fingerprints to get a digital signature. The Cuban nationals spoke with the Herald while in ICE detention in Louisiana and Georgia and provided some copies of the forms to the Miami Herald.

“Lots of people signed it because they don’t know English, but I do, so I told them I wasn’t going to sign,” a 28-year-old detainee said in Spanish during a video interview. The man is one of the hundreds of Cubans whom ICE has continued to detain for years despite being eligible for release.

“They threw me against the wall, yanked my arms back and put them in cuffs. They almost broke my thumb while trying to get my fingerprint authorization,” the man added.

He paused: “On paper it looks like I’m dying to go see my family. But what’s really happening is that we are all dying in here and will die if we go back.”

When asked by the Herald about the accusations, ICE declined to discuss the subject.

No one is being deported to Cuba at the moment by ICE because the island’s communist government has barred admittance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The last deportation flight to Cuba was in late February, when ICE sent 119 deportees home.