The Trump administration is quietly sending hundreds of Cubans and other immigrants with significant criminal records in buses across the border to Mexico, in an expansion of third-country deportations.

Although Cuba accepts deportation flights from the U.S., its longtime practice has been to reject deportees who have been convicted of certain crimes. That has left many of the island’s immigrants in limbo for years — unable to return to the island but stripped of their legal status to stay in the United States.

But without legal documentation in Mexico, they are now in a new limbo, and it is unclear what future awaits them. Some told the Miami Herald they have spent weeks searching for work, food and shelter, and sleeping on the street.

The Herald spoke to six men in Mexico and lawyers for six other deportees who say the Department of Homeland Security drove them in buses to the southern border and handed them over to authorities in Mexico. All had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. Some had served prison sentences and had final orders of deportations for years. They said Cuba would not take them back.

The men have serious criminal convictions in the U.S. including drug dealing, domestic violence, theft, armed robbery, child abuse and battery. Some had additional charges for which they weren’t convicted — including in one case attempted murder.

Some said that officials told them they could either get off the bus in Mexico or be sent to an unspecified country in Africa. Others said they were not told where they were heading, and others said Mexican authorities left them near the Guatemala border and told them to “head south” out of Mexico.

Serious offenses

The Herald was able to identify additional men who have also been sent to Mexico — including a 66-year-old man who was charged in Alabama earlier this year for attempted child molestation, and a man who pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Texas. He had attacked two women, including his romantic partner, with a machete.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to specific questions about what agreement or policy governed these deportations, or if a new agreement had been reached with Mexico.

“If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, you could end up in CECOT, Eswatini, Ghana, South Sudan, or another third country,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement to the Herald. “President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem are not going to allow criminal illegal aliens to remain indefinitely in the U.S.” CECOT is a maximum security prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent 238 Venezuelans they accused of being gang members earlier this year. In the case of the men sent to El Salvador, records obtained by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune show that Homeland Security knew most of the men did not have criminal convictions.

A spokesperson for the National Institute of Migration in Mexico did not respond to multiple Herald requests for comment.

During the Biden administration, Mexico accepted up to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela the U.S. returned after they had crossed the southwest border. But the federal government has not typically shipped off Cubans living in the U.S. interior and who had arrived through Mexico to its southern neighbor.

It is unclear how many immigrants from third countries have been deported to Mexico from the interior of the U.S. this year. One shelter in Mexico has registered nearly 350 Cubans, the vast majority longtime U.S. residents, since the beginning of the year. On July 11, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the U.S. has deported 6,525 people from other countries to Mexico since Trump’s first day in office - but she did not specify if they came from the border or interior of the U.S.

Potential exploitation

Lawyers who spoke with the Herald said that the deportations open migrants up to exploitation from organized crime, kidnappings, and a lack of access to attorneys. The U.S. has also sent Cubans and other immigrants to other countries, including South Sudan, an African nation plunged in political turmoil and armed conflict.

Previously, the U.S. government would generally send people to third countries if their country of birth no longer existed or they were dual nationals. But that’s different from sending a Cuban national to a prison in Eswatini, said immigration attorney Mark Prada. “Very often, these are people with old crimes that have served their sentences and paid their debt to society already,” Prada said. “Sure, they should be able to be deported to their home countries. But if you send them to some third country, including to the other side of the globe, without family or contacts, that’s inhumane.”

Willy Allen is a veteran immigration attorney who has practiced in Miami for nearly four decades. He said he’s never seen Cuban nationals being sent to third countries before.

This year, two of Allen’s Cuban clients were deported to Mexico. Both had serious criminal records, he said, and have lived in the United States since at least the early 1980s. They lost their permanent U.S. residencies, but Cuba would not accept them, so they went to annual check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I don’t have a problem with people who are delinquents being deported. They lost the right to live here when they committed crimes,” Allen said. “But I believe that if you are going to return them to their country, you have to give them an opportunity to find a country where to go.”

The streets of Villahermosa

Sheinbaum has previously said that irregular immigration in the U.S. should be fixed through reform and not violence or raids and described the criminalization of immigrants as “racist.” In December 2024, she said that she was seeking to minimize deportations of people from other countries to Mexico.

But the deportations of Cubans with criminal records to Mexico raise questions about how closely the administration is working with its southern neighbor to carry out the deportations. Cubans told the Herald that Mexican authorities are receiving them. And during a visit to Mexico last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Mexican authorities view irregular migration as a “threat to their own security.”

“It is the closest security cooperation we have ever had, maybe with any country but certainly in the history of U.S.-Mexico relations,” Rubio said.

Katie Blankenship, an attorney representing one of the men who was deported, said that she didn’t know where her client was for over a week, before Michael Borrego Fernandez turned up in Mexico near the Guatemalan border. In 2025, he pleaded guilty to grand theft.

“There’s a huge lack of accountability and visibility and insight, as is the case with all these Trump policies and practices. And it’s inflicting real harm,” Blankenship said.

In the city of Villahermosa, the capital of the state of Tabasco near the border with Guatemala, one shelter for migrants has registered nearly 350 Cubans since Trump assumed office.

Josue Martinez Leal, the spokesperson and deputy coordinator for Albergue Oasis de Paz del Espíritu Santo, said the deported men are older, lived in the U.S. for decades and have children and spouses who are citizens. Among them are older men who have serious medical conditions that the shelter is trying to treat — the first time the shelter has to deal with several of these kinds of cases. He said other shelters across the country are experiencing the same influx.

“Many of them are Peter Pan,” Martinez Leal said, referring to the 1960s program that brought thousands of Cuban children to the United States through the Catholic Church. “That we are getting Cubans is a very new situation.”

Historically, Villahermosa was not a stop along the way to the United States for immigrants traveling northwards, he said. But in 2019, the Trump administration required some asylum seekers to wait for their court hearings in Mexico. Shortly after, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s administration created a migrant detention center in the city.

But this year, Cubans are arriving in a reverse migration back from the United States, sometimes without phones or IDs. Unable to return to the United States or Cuba, many opt to stay in Mexico. That means helping them find permanent housing and work, and legal documentation that the government is not yet providing them.

“It’s an issue that is not getting attention. But it’s the new challenge for the shelters,” said Martinez Leal.

Three Cuban men told the Herald they are sleeping there on the street. They fear being killed by Mexican cartels that prey on immigrants. The Herald has been unable to confirm whether any Cubans the U.S. deported to Mexico have been kidnapped, but migrants experience rampant violence while transiting through the country. In November 2024, ProPublica found that there are mass kidnapping rings in southern Mexico that prey on immigrants and kidnap them for ransom.

“Unfortunately, any immigrant within Mexico’s territory can be a victim of organized crime,” Martinez Leal said.

Manuel Lazaro Suarez Perez, 46, is among those who found themselves in Villahermosa after being deported from the United States. He came to Florida as an infant from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

“My dad’s a political prisoner and a U.S. citizen. My mom’s a permanent resident, all my kids were born (in the United States). I’ve been here all my life,” Suarez Perez said. His youngest daughter just gave birth to a girl.

In a statement to the Herald, McLaughlin called Suarez Perez a “serial criminal” with 30 convictions and said he was ordered removed from the U.S. about 20 years ago. She said that he and the two other Cuban men each had long criminal records.

“Thanks to President Trump and Secretary Noem, these three monsters are out of our country,” she said.

The Herald was unable to verify if Suarez Perez had as many as 30 convictions, but did find criminal cases. He told reporters he was first arrested when he was a minor for drug-related charges. He was later convicted of numerous crimes – from cocaine possession to traffic violations to multiple aggravated-battery charges – and lost his permanent U.S. residence. In 2023, he was charged with attempted arson and attempted murder for allegedly throwing a firework into a mobile home while a family was sleeping. He said he didn’t do it. The case’s disposition is recorded in county records as “no action,” meaning prosecutors opted not to pursue charges.

Suarez Perez had been going to probation check-ins in Miami, but at a check-in in May he was detained. In early September, while at the Krome North Service Processing Center, he was given a document to sign saying he was being transferred to a center in San Diego.

Instead, he said he and others were flown to California and driven to the border.

“They lied to us,” said Suarez Perez.

After four days of driving, Mexican authorities released the men on the side of the road in Tabasco on Sept. 9, in the same clothing they had worn in United States immigration detention, the men told the Herald.

“You’re free,” an officer told them.

Without documentation, shelter, food or funds, Suarez Perez and the two other men said they have spent the weeks since they arrived sleeping on the street, watching as more and more men arrive on buses from the north.

“You can see them lying down under the bridges,” he said.

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This story was produced with financial support from the Esserman Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.

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