Trump is deporting thousands of Cubans and other immigrants to Mexico

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico. It was 2 in the morning when a bus carrying dozens of American deportees arrived in this sweltering city in southern Mexico.

Mexican immigration agents who had guarded the group on their three-day journey from the border said their defendants, still dressed in detainees' prison uniforms, were now free to leave.

Alberto Rodríguez, 73, walked limping with a cane down a deserted industrial street. A stroke had left him perpetually confused, unable to remember many details of his life beyond the fact that he had been born in Cuba and had spent almost 50 years in the United States.

“Where am I?” shout.

“Villahermosa,” someone responded.

Like most 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.

As part of his sweeping anti-immigration campaign, President Trump has sent deportees to countries other than their countries of origin, including Rwanda, El Salvador and South Sudan.

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

Some are then sent back to their home countries, 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 deported non-Mexicans during the first 11 months of Trump's second term, including people from Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua, according to Mexican government data.

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

Banished from the United States, undocumented in Mexico and unable to return home, deportees are trapped in “an almost stateless limbo,” according to a recent report by the advocacy group Refugees International.

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

Yael Schacher, one of the report's authors, called Mexico's decision to send migrants to cities like Villahermosa, just hours from the border with Guatemala, an effort to keep them “out of sight.”

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

The city is mired in a violent conflict between drug trafficking 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 throwing extremely vulnerable people into a dangerous place,” said Gretchen Kuhner, director of the nonprofit Institute for Migrant Women.

For decades, Mexico has been a transit country for migrants, mostly relatively young people and families en route to the United States.

The new deportees to Mexico fit a very different profile.

Many were long-time U.S. residents who entered the country years ago, often legally. Some had been granted the opportunity to stay after demonstrating to immigration judges that they would likely be persecuted if they returned to their home country.

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

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

It was only under Trump that those immigrants were targeted for removal.

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

Rodríguez, with a slim build and white beard, spends his days sitting in the shade of a tree outside the Oasis of Peace of the Holy Spirit Amparito, a small Catholic refuge nestled between junkyards 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 83 years old and spent most of his life working in Florida before he was detained and sent to a detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Many are sick, including Ricardo Pérez, 67, who said immigration agents pushed him to cross the U.S. border in a wheelchair, or Luis René Lemus, 59, who suffers from Parkinson's and schizophrenia and has struggled to get necessary medications in Mexico.

Ricardo del Pino, 67, was seriously 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 kept the ashes in a wooden niche in the shelter's small chapel.

He is angry that the United States is deporting people who are clearly vulnerable and that Mexico is not doing more to care for them.

“They are 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 being deported from the United States.

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

“Honestly?” said. “I'm just looking for a weapon.”

“No, no, no,” intervened José Alejandro Aponte Delgado, 53 years old. He put his arm around his friend.

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

However, there is little relief in sight.

Severe foreign aid cuts by the Trump administration have greatly reduced Mexico's ability to care for migrants.

Last year, the administration cut $2 billion in annual U.S. aid to Latin America and the Caribbean, forcing nonprofit shelters, legal aid providers and others who work with migrants to lay off staff or suspend operations entirely. Martinez said he was forced to fire the shelter's doctor, psychologist and social worker.

The freeze has also resulted in staff cuts at Mexico's refugee agency, which was indirectly funded by U.S. money funneled through the United Nations.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said that unlike other countries that accept deportees from third countries, her nation has not signed a formal agreement to receive immigrants from the United States. The people his country has accepted so far, he 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 do more to help deportees obtain protection as refugees, speeding up the current process, which has been taking months, he said. “If they were truly acting on humanitarian grounds, they would presumably implement a much more humane policy regarding these people.”

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

Human rights advocates say Mexican officials rarely inform deportees about 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 contact with a Honduran-born trans woman who proved to a U.S. court that she was in 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 attacked, she has started dressing like a man, Kuhner said.

Refugees International documented the case of a Salvadoran who gained protection from deportation to his home country under the Convention Against Torture. The United States sent him to Mexico, which eventually helped return him to El Salvador, where he was subsequently imprisoned in the country's most famous prison.

This week, an appeals court allowed the Trump administration to continue deporting immigrants to countries other than their countries of origin. Last year, he sent a Cuban migrant about 10,000 miles away, to the African kingdom of Eswatini.

That means more buses are likely to arrive in Villahermosa, depositing deportees still dressed in prison sweatshirts.

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

De León was ordered deported 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 records of him. And so he is essentially stateless, surviving on the savings he accumulated as a truck driver in California.

He rents a small apartment on the roof, which he shares with other deportees his age or older.

They spend their days smoking cigarettes, watching movies, and reminiscing about life in America.

“I miss hamburgers,” De León said.

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

“I miss the beach,” De León said.

They don't have hot water. No job prospects. “It's the same bad day over and over again,” he said.

Lázara Santana, 57, emigrated to the United States from Cuba when she was 11 years old.

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

Lázara Santana, a Cuban deported to Mexico from the United States, said her only son is a Marine who served in several missions in Afghanistan.

For two decades, he visited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office annually to verify his parole. This fall she was arrested.

He said immigration officials gave him an option for deportation: “You can go to the Congo or Mexico.”

He sleeps in a shared room that he rents with money sent to him by his partner in the United States. She has not requested refugee status in Mexico. He said he is afraid to leave the house.

“I go to sleep crying and 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.