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To their shock, Cubans in Florida are being deported in record numbers

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Heidy Sánchez took her 17-month-old daughter to a routine check-in last April with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa, Florida. During the appointment, federal authorities told her that she was being detained and that her husband should pick up their daughter, who was still breastfeeding. Two days later, Sánchez, 44, who worked as a home health aide, was deported.

Sánchez’s story quickly spread across social media, in part because she is Cuban, a group that had long been treated differently than other immigrants, even when they entered the country illegally. That has changed under President Donald Trump.

He has repatriated more than 1,600 Cubans in 2025, according to the Cuban government. That is about double the number of Cubans who were repatriated in 2024. And in the years that Trump has been president, he has sent more Cubans back than his three predecessors.

Those numbers are greater for Cubans who were deported by land into Mexico. Some of them had been in the United States for decades and built families and businesses, but were removed because of an old criminal conviction — say, from Miami’s infamous cocaine cowboys days in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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(originally published in the NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/us/politics/cubans-florida-deportations-trump.html)