Blocked at border, Cubans look to Trump
More than 1,000 Cuban migrants who endured monthslong treks are stuck in limbo in Mexico
SNUEVO LAREDO, Mexico he spent weeks hiking through the Amazon, crossing a crocodile-filled river. She scaled border walls, escaped from immigration detention in Panama and slept in a church. Broke, hungry and exhausted, she found refuge with indigenous people in the jungle who took her in and fed her for a week.
Finally, six months after fleeing Cuba on a tortuous journey to the United States, Marleni Barbier, a dental assistant from Havana, made it to the border with Texas — about 12 hours too late.
More than 1,000 Cuban migrants who endured monthslong treks across as many as 10 countries to reach the United States are marooned in Mexico, halted by the Obama administration’s decision this month to end special immigration privileges for Cubans who make it to the U.S. border.
The abrupt change is profound for Cubans, who fled their country by the tens of thousands in the past year to take advantage of a decades old policy that permitted them to enter the United States.
Now, the many Cubans stranded in Mexico — and potentially thousands more plodding up the migrant trail through the Americas — are hoping for a reprieve: that President Donald Trump, who was elected on a promise to build a wall along the Mexican border, will let them through.
“I have faith that Trump will change it,” said Barbier, 44, who arrived at the Texas border right after President Barack Obama announced the end of special rights for Cubans. “To take away a law at the last minute like that, it’s so unjust.”
Some of the Cubans stuck in limbo at the Texas border arrived Jan. 12, the day the Obama administration eliminated the “wet foot, dry foot” rule. The rule, which dated to 1995, allowed Cubans who reached the United States to enter the country.
About 150 Cubans are parked only 50 steps from the pedestrian bridge that connects Nuevo Laredo, in Mexico, to Laredo, Texas. Bewildered and deflated, they are being fed by Mexican strangers, and they pray. “Everybody was racing to get here before the inauguration on the 20th,” said Yamila González Cabeza, 44, a teacher from Cuba, saying that many migrants thought the Trump administration would be the one to shut the border. “The reverse was true. We did not expect this surprise on the 12th.”
The Cuban government has long abhorred the special immigration privileges, saying the policy bleeds the island of its citizens and lures waves of migrants into dangerous journeys by land and sea. In striking down the rule, Obama said it was “designed for a different era” during a period of hostilities before the U.S. restored diplomatic relations with the Cuban government. By taking away their privilege to enter, Obama said, the United States would treat Cuban migrants “the same way we treat migrants from other countries.”
That decision could put Trump in an awkward position: He campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, vowing not to let migrants slip through U.S. borders. But Trump has also threatened to overturn Obama’s executive orders and get tough on the Cuban government.
Trump has said the wet foot, dry foot policy, which sent back Cubans caught at sea but allowed those who reached land to enter, was unfair.
Still, the Cubans in Nuevo Laredo hope he will show humanitarian compassion for people who undertook arduous voyages to escape communism and extreme poverty.
Barbier said she had spent all of the $8,000 she made from the sale of her house in Cuba to make it this far. “That money is gone, gone, gone,” she said.
About 41,000 Cubans made similar trips across the Americas last year. But because she got to the border a little too late, Barbier and other Cubans like her may be sent back unless they can prove they endured individual persecution, not just poverty or lack of opportunity, on the island.
“I certainly have sympathy for them, but the policy has been changed and the moment they changed it, the policy was eliminated,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents Laredo. “They didn’t say anyone in the pipeline can come in. By luck, some got in and some did not.”
To qualify for residency in the United States, Cubans will have to show they would be personally persecuted back home.
“Being pinched and limited and controlled by the Cuban government isn’t enough to satisfy the U.S. authorities any more,” she said. “Cubans who are thinking about exiting will undergo a profound reframing of their identity as a result of these changes.”