Few loved Donald Trump in 2024 more than south Florida Cubans, who have connected him with the impending destruction of communist Cuba and what will assuredly be an unmessy return to 1958, with the past seven decades erased and everyone who left when they were 4 going back and taking over their grandparents’ lands and having all the peons and everything. Maybe Hyman Roth can show up too. Well, part of the thing with Miami Cubans and the Latin American conservatives who have flocked to Miami from Venezuela, Honduras, Colombia, and other nations that are somewhat problematic at home is that they think of themselves as the good ones and that Trump would leave them alone but round up all those indigenous Guatemalans and black Haitians and get rid of them. But of course, Stephen Miller hates all immigrants and anyone who speaks Spanish. So Trump has targeted Miami Cubans almost as hard as he’s targeted anyone else with a Latin American surname.

Since returning to office, Donald Trump has summarily dismantled that approach. Cubans in Miami voted for him overwhelmingly; they heard his rants about mass deportation but assumed he would target only criminals. They also believed that recent arrivals could still count on the protections of the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), the landmark 1966 legislation that allowed any Cubans who had landed in the US after Castro took power to apply for a green card if they remained there for at least two years. In 1976 the law was amended to allow Cubans to apply for legal residency after only a year and a day in the country. For Cubans, unlike others, the protections that came with residency were applied retroactively, effectively signaling to immigration officials that Cubans were not to be removed.

Though it was never described as such, the law represented a kind of amnesty. It gave Cubans a legal path to citizenship however they had arrived, whatever their status, whether they had illegally overstayed a tourist visa or were granted the murky status of “temporary parole.” One of the hundreds of thousands of people to avail themselves of the law’s benevolence was Rubio’s grandfather, whose 1962 deportation order was nullified by its passage. In the decades that followed, Cubans were generally spared from immigration crackdowns thanks to the CAA.

No longer. In the first year of his second administration Trump all but decimated political asylum for immigrants from around the world, making no special exception for Cubans, as both parties long had. The rate of denials of asylum cases increased by half and has only continued to increase in 2026. And while the CAA remains the law of the land, Trump’s administration no longer seems to feel bound to observe it. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term an estimated 45,000 Cubans have received deportation orders. The Cuban Ministry of the Interior reported that last year 1,669 Cubans were deported back to the island. By May 2026 another 612 had been forcibly returned. The most recent flight, carrying seventy-six people, landed in Havana just a day after Blanche announced that the US was indicting Castro. Still others have been deported to third countries, with Mexico accepting as many as six thousand between January 2025 and March 2026. Many more Cubans have joined countless other migrants in legal limbo as authorities institute travel bans and pause green card applications.

According to the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas, a nonpartisan think tank, the Trump administration’s policies since January 2025 have left at least half a million Cubans vulnerable to detention and deportation. Some of them are currently languishing in ICE custody. A number of them have died there. In June 2025 a seventy-five-year-old Cuban citizen named Isidro Pérez died at Krome detention center just outside Miami; he had lived in the US for fifty-nine years. On January 3, 2026, a fifty-five-year-old Cuban national and father of four named Geraldo Lunas Campos died during an altercation with guards at a detention center in El Paso; an autopsy ruled the death a homicide. In April two young Cubans in ICE custody died of apparent suicide. Almost everyone in Miami knows someone affected by the changes to immigration policy. The mood in the community is “terror,” one immigration attorney told us as the crackdown ramped up last year. Terror, agreed another, “and Stephen Miller is Robespierre.”

I think Himmler is more appropriate a comparison than Robespierre here. But OK.

This might even be having some impact politically.

For the past decade Fernandez has faced hostility and even threats from community members for his anti-Republican turn, but he told us that he sensed that Trump’s immigration crackdown was prompting some introspection among Miamians. A poll conducted last fall by the Miami-based strategy firm Bendixen and Amandi International confirmed his intuition, finding that Trump’s net approval among Cubans was 59 percent as of last October, a noticeable drop from the roughly 70 percent of Miami Cubans who had voted for him just a year earlier. In December Miami elected Eileen Higgins as mayor, the first Democrat to reclaim the office from the GOP in almost thirty years.

Trump’s renewed pressure campaign on the Cuban government, should it result in significant change in Cuba, may restore any support he might have lost among the exiles in Miami. But not everyone agrees on what change will look like or how to achieve it. Some in South Florida have condemned Washington’s apparent willingness to negotiate with Cuban power holders, claiming the approach doesn’t go far enough and calling instead for total regime change and even military intervention. María Elvira Salazar, the Republican congresswoman, urged constituents to stop sending all help to family in Cuba, because only that kind of pressure would cause the government to fall. But many who publicly support such hard-line political rhetoric quietly continue sending money, medicine, and necessities to their loved ones. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Cubans in the city remain in anxious suspension—unsure what might happen in Cuba and what fate awaits their family members on both sides of the Florida Straits.

Among them is Casanella, who has received no determination on his petition for asylum. Four and a half years after he entered the US, his case remains pending, leaving him continuously vulnerable to deportation. His eldest son, Pablo, now nine, has grown increasingly aware of his family’s situation; in his letter to Santa Claus last year he asked for political asylum for his father, alongside a Lego set. Early one morning that fall ICE had knocked on the Casanellas’ door. No one answered; they spent the following days afraid to go outside.

We will see. A slightly smarter Republican president would have locked in this support forever and left these people alone and done exactly what they expected him to do, but that wouldn’t satisfy Herr Miller’s delight in concentration camps and mass death.

One more point–this nation should be open to all immigrants. Sometimes in comments, I see people say that we shouldn’t let in right-wing immigrants. This is another form of Trumpism to me. America should be a nation that actually stands up for its so often stated values. Immigrants can choose where they fit into that. We should not be placing political standards on immigrants, and neither should Trump, minus things like they were torturers in a dictatorship and personal extreme culpability like that.

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