While anti-Cuban congressmen remain complicitly silent, folded to presidential and state decisions on the inhumane and arbitrary treatment of recently arrived migrants or long-time residents, new measures by Donald Trump have put immigrant communities in South Florida on alert, where panic and helplessness prevail.
According to El Nuevo Herald, a new package or Memorandum from the president was announced, which includes rapid deportations to third countries in as little as six hours after notice, even without the destination nations offering security guarantees.
Immigration lawyers, human rights advocates and families denounce that this measure represents one of the most extreme tactics of President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration approach. "They are creating real chaos," Elizabeth Amaran, a Miami-based immigration lawyer, told the newspaper, questioning the impossibility of preparing people's legal defense. "In practice, it is a total denial of due process," she said.
The publication adds that "the Miami area, home to large communities of Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians, is one of the most affected by the new policy, and also one of the most politically sensitive. Many immigrants in South Florida are currently living in legal limbo, with pending asylum applications or final orders of deportation that have not been executed."
According to the memo, first reported by The Washington Post, ICE is now authorized to deport non-citizens - including long-term U.S. residents - to third countries with only 24 hours' notice. In "exigent circumstances," that deadline can be reduced to six hours.
The report continues that in cases where the receiving country has offered "credible diplomatic assurances" that the deportee will not face torture or persecution, ICE can execute the deportation without prior notice, which legal experts have called "an unconscionable removal power, with few safeguards and no transparency, far below the legal standards and due process required by law," Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, told Reuters.
According to the report, last week, eight migrants from countries such as Cuba, Sudan and Vietnam were deported to South Sudan, a nation mired in civil conflict. U.S. officials reportedly pressured five African countries - Liberia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Gabon - to accept deportees from other regions, such as Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Migrant advocates point out that most of the detainees at risk under this policy have no criminal record and many have pending asylum applications or other legal avenues available; however, they are being deported before their cases are even heard.
But from the panic and pain of forced separation from families and home, they go to total helplessness, in unfamiliar countries, with no relatives and no idea where to go.
Many are reportedly being sent to remote areas of Mexico, despite not being Mexican citizens, and without resources to survive. They are bused to remote border areas, given a temporary 15-day permit and left there; no money, no shelter, no plan.
This is a new chapter in the sum of neo-fascist modalities of the Government of the worst, headed by Trump and by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, promoters of concentration camps for migrants in military bases, of macabre prisons in El Salvador -exclusively for Venezuelans-, of more than 200 prisons or immigration detention centers in the United States, many of them lucrative and questionable private businesses, and of a new Alcatraz prison, surrounded by crocodiles and political alligators west of the modern and intimidating city of Miami.
