Trump is deporting thousands of Cubans and other migrants to Mexico

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico — It was 2 a.m. when a bus carrying dozens of U.S. deportees heaved into this sweltering city in southern Mexico.

The Mexican immigration agents who had guarded the group on their three-day trip from the border said their charges, still dressed in the prison garb of detainees, were now free to go.

Alberto Rodríguez, 73, limped with a cane down a deserted industrial street. A stroke had left him perpetually foggy, unable to recall many details about his life beyond the fact that he had been born in Cuba and had spent nearly 50 years in the United States.

“Where am I?” he called out.

“Villahermosa,” someone answered.

Like most of the others, Rodríguez had never set foot in Mexico and had never heard of this city of a million people surrounded by dense jungle. The deportees wandered in the dark until they found a park, where Rodríguez spent the first of what would be many nights curled up on the ground, trying to sleep.

Alberto Rodríguez, second from left, and other Cuban deportees from the United States wait for medical attention at a shelter in Villahermosa, Mexico.

As part of his sweeping immigration crackdown, President Trump has sent deportees to nations that are not their home countries, including Rwanda, El Salvador and South Sudan.

But by far the largest number of third-country deportees are being quietly sent to Mexico, where they are quickly bused to smaller cities thousands of miles south of the U.S. border.

Some are then shipped back to their countries of origin — including, in some cases, people who have demonstrated that they face possible persecution there. Others languish in Mexico with few resources and an uncertain path to legal status under Mexican law.

Mexico accepted nearly 13,000 non-Mexicans deported during the first 11 months of Trump’s second term, including people from Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua, according to data from the Mexican government.

The largest group was made up of immigrants from Cuba, whose communist government sometimes refuses to take back U.S. deportees, particularly those with criminal records.

Banished from the U.S., undocumented in Mexico and unable to go home, deportees are stuck in “a quasi-stateless limbo,” according to a recent report by the advocacy group Refugees International.

Miguel Martínez Cruz, a Cuban deportee from the United States, opens the door for customers at a convenience store.

Yael Schacher, one of the authors of the report, called Mexico’s decision to send migrants to cities such as Villahermosa, a few hours from the Guatemalan border, an effort to keep them “out of sight.”

Villahermosa lacks adequate services, with just one migrant shelter and no office of the federal agency that processes refugee applications.

The city is engulfed in a violent conflict between drug gangs. Nine out of 10 residents say their city is unsafe, according to census data, more than in any other municipality in Mexico.

“They’re dumping people in a dangerous place who are extremely vulnerable,” said Gretchen Kuhner, director of the Institute for Women in Migration, a nonprofit.

For decades, Mexico has been a transit country for migrants — mostly relatively young people and families on their way to the United States.

The new deportees to Mexico fit a very different profile.

Many were longtime U.S. residents who entered the country years ago, often legally. Some had been granted the opportunity to stay after proving to immigration judges that they would probably be persecuted if returned to their homeland.

A Cuban migrant poses for a portrait showing his tattoos at a shelter in Villahermosa, in Mexico’s Tabasco state.

Many of the Cubans expelled to Mexico lost their refugee status decades ago after committing crimes, but were allowed to stay in the U.S. with unexecuted deportation orders because the Cuban government refused to take them back.

It was only under Trump that such migrants were targeted for removal.

That includes people like Rodríguez, who was convicted of robbery in 1990, according to court records.

Rodríguez, who has a slight frame and a white beard, spends his days sitting in the shade of a tree outside Oasis de Paz del Espíritu Santo Amparito, a small Catholic shelter nestled amid junk yards and mechanic shops.

He is one of many elderly Cubans with health problems deported in recent months, according to aid workers.

The shelter’s oldest resident is an 83-year-old who spent most of his life working in Florida before he was picked up and sent to a detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Many are infirm, including Ricardo Pérez, 67, who said he was pushed across the U.S. border by immigration agents in a wheelchair, or 59-year-old Luis René Lemus, who suffers from Parkinson’s and schizophrenia and has struggled to procure needed medication in Mexico.

Ricardo del Pino, 67, was severely ill when he arrived at the shelter last summer, according to Josué Martínez Leal, one of its directors. Del Pino died of cancer a few months later.

Martínez had the man’s body cremated, and stored the ashes in a wooden niche in the shelter’s small chapel.

He is angry that the U.S. is deporting people who are so clearly vulnerable, and that Mexico isn’t doing more to care for them.

“They’re sending them here to die,” Martínez said.

An employee at the Villahermosa shelter holds the ashes of Ricardo del Pino, who died last year a few months after he was deported from the United States.

Rodríguez, who sleeps many nights outside of a public hospital a few blocks from the shelter, said he feels so hopeless that he is thinking about taking his own life.

“Honestly?” he said. “I’m just looking for a gun.”

“No, no, no,” interjected 53-year-old José Alejandro Aponte Delgado. He put his arm around his friend.

“I’ve felt the same way at times,” Aponte said. “It’s going to get better, brother. It has to.”

Yet there is little relief in sight.

Severe foreign aid cuts by the Trump government have greatly reduced Mexico’s capacity to tend to migrants.

Last year the administration slashed $2 billion in annual U.S. aid destined for Latin America and the Caribbean, forcing nonprofit shelters, legal aid providers and others that work with migrants to lay off staff or suspend their operations altogether. Martínez said he was forced to fire the shelter’s doctor, psychologist and social worker.

The freeze has also resulted in staffing cuts at Mexico’s refugee agency, which was indirectly funded with U.S. money channeled through the United Nations.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said that unlike other countries accepting third-country deportees, her nation has not signed a formal agreement to take immigrants from the U.S. The people her country has so far accepted, she said, were welcomed for “humanitarian” reasons.

Andrés Ramírez, who served as director of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance under Sheinbaum’s predecessor, said Mexico is under pressure to appease Trump, who has threatened tariffs on Mexican imports if Sheinbaum does not comply with his wishes on immigration and other issues.

But it could be doing more to help the deportees gain refugee protection, speeding up the current process, which takes months, he said. “If you truly were acting on humanitarian grounds, you would presumably implement a much more humane policy regarding these people.”

Pedro Rodríguez, a Cuban migrant recently deported from the United States, at the Villahermosa shelter.

Human rights advocates say Mexican officials rarely inform deportees of their right to seek asylum in the country. They also say Mexico has clearly violated the principle of “non-refoulement,” which holds that governments should not send people to places where they may face persecution.

Kuhner said her organization is in touch with a trans woman born in Honduras who proved to a U.S. court that she faced danger if she returned to her home country because of her gender identity. But after she was deported, Mexico sent her to Honduras. To avoid being targeted, she has begun dressing like a man, Kuhner said.

Refugees International documented the case of a Salvadoran man who has won protection from deportation to his home country in under the Convention Against Torture. The U.S. sent him to Mexico, which eventually helped return him to El Salvador, where he was subsequently jailed in the country’s most notorious prison.

An appeals court this week allowed the Trump administration to continue to deport immigrants to nations other than their home countries. Last year, it sent one Cuban migrant some 10,000 miles away in the African kingdom of Eswatini.

That means it’s likely that more buses will be pulling into Villahermosa, depositing deportees still dressed in prison sweats.

People like Mauricio De Leon, 50, who was born in Guatemala and taken by his mother to the U.S. when he was a year old. She lost custody of him and he grew up in the foster system in Long Beach.

De Leon was given an order of deportation in 2007 after serving prison time for drug trafficking. He was deported last year. Mexico tried to send him to Guatemala, but Guatemala said it had no record of him. And so he is essentially stateless, surviving on savings he accumulated as a truck driver in California.

He rents a small rooftop apartment, which he shares with other deportees his age and older.

They spend their days smoking cigarettes, watching movies and reminiscing about life in the U.S.

“I miss burgers,” De Leon said.

“I miss pizza,” said Miguel Martínez Cruz, 65, a Cuban deportee who is blind in one eye.

“I miss the beach,” De Leon said.

They have no hot water. No prospects for work. “It’s the same bad day over and over,” he said.

Lázara Santana, 57, migrated to the U.S. from Cuba at age 11.

She lost her refugee status 20 years ago for selling drugs. Her only son, she said, is a Marine who served several tours in Afghanistan and voted for Trump.

Lázara Santana, a Cuban deported to Mexico from the U.S., said her only son is a Marine who served several tours in Afghanistan.

For two decades, she went annually to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to check in about her parole. This fall, they took her into custody.

She said immigration officials gave her a choice for her deportation: “You can go to Congo or Mexico.”

She sleeps in a shared room that she rents with money sent from her partner back in the U.S. She has not applied for refugee status in Mexico. She said she is afraid to leave the house.

“I go to sleep crying, I wake up crying,” she said. “This feels like a nightmare, and I can’t wake up.”

Times researcher Cary Schneider in Los Angeles contributed to this report.