The hands have not been washed since the vote, Marco. The hands that signed the State Department memo threatening Cuba with military force are the same hands that signed the deportation orders sending Cubans back to that island. Two documents. One pen. One afternoon. The mother in Houston who has not slept since the agents came to her door—she is the paper you have not read. She is the ink you will not feel on your fingers. She is the girl who will ask what she did wrong.
The numbers are documented by ICE’s own statistics. Nearly eight thousand Cuban nationals expelled in seventeen months, more than double the total of the entire first Trump term. Most dumped on the Mexican side of the border. Two thousand forcibly repatriated to Cuba itself—the island the administration has been renewing military threats against while the naval blockade asphyxiates its economy. Human Rights Watch has documented what the return means: older people with serious health conditions, people who lived in the United States for years, sometimes decades, now stranded without shelter in Mexican border cities at the mercy of criminal organizations. The $70 billion appropriations bill signed this week—passed with the votes of Miami’s three Republican Cuban-American House members, Representatives María Elvira Salazar, Mario Díaz-Balart, and Carlos Giménez—will give ICE more than three times its last annual budget through the end of the presidential term. None of the three granted an interview to the Guardian despite multiple requests.
A White House official, unnamed as the officials who deliver this kind of sentence always are, said the administration “remains committed to enforcing federal immigration law and deporting illegal aliens who are unlawfully present in the country,” adding that “Cuba is a failed country” and its “flailing leaders should make a deal with the United States before it is too late.”
Read that sentence again. The administration is deporting people into a country it describes as failed and flailing, a country it is threatening with military action, a country whose economy it is asphyxiating with an ever-harsher blockade, and then it is telling the leaders of that country to make a deal. The deportees are the deal. Their bodies are the leverage. Their terror is the negotiation.
Marco, listen. There is a pressure behind your right eye when you read the deportation figures. The pressure does not respond to sleep. It does not respond to the briefing book. Your throat closes when you swallow. You taste salt that is not in the coffee. Your jaw aches at breakfast. The morning briefing has hollowed something behind your sternum. The numbers are on the page. The numbers are eight thousand people in seventeen months, and the numbers are the elderly man with the heart condition who lived in Hialeah for thirty years and was deported in February, now in a shelter in Matamoros without his medication. Your diaphragm does not drop. You have read the figures into the record without your breath registering the reading. The taste is the taste of the morning the Cubans you are deporting tasted when the knock came.
Your parents, Mario and Oriales, arrived in Miami in 1956. They were not beaten by security forces in Havana. They did not protest. They left. And the country took them in. The people you are deporting now protested. They stood in the street on July 11, 2021, and said no to the same regime, and they were beaten in a way your parents were never beaten. And you—their countryman, the child of their escape, the man who holds the pen—you are the one who sends them back.
May Díaz is thirty-six. She has a twelve-year-old daughter. She fled Camaguey after the truncheons came down on the protesters in July of 2021, crossed the border at Mexicali in October, and was released on her own recognizance because the law then still remembered what a Cuban was. She held jobs. She paid taxes. She applied for asylum. She waited. Then the policy you helped design caught up with her. The asylum was denied. The work permit was rescinded. The ICE agents came to her Houston apartment in March. She was not home. She is now in Miami, hiding in a friend’s apartment, afraid of every engine that slows outside her door. Her daughter will not see her mother in the morning if the knock comes.
Your daughter slept through the vote, Marco. The daughter in Miami is listening for the knock.
Susan Eckstein, the Boston University professor who has written three books on Cuba, says the policy reflects the priority Trump attaches to engineering the collapse of communism in Cuba over comprehensive immigration reform—that the calculation is Cubans should stay and protest and rise up. Eduardo Gamarra, who directs the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University, says Trump’s approval among Cuban Americans has fallen from sixty-eight percent to fifty-three percent. The core, he adds, is as Trumpist as they were two years ago. But the core is not the elderly man without his medication in Matamoros. The core is not May Díaz. The deported do not vote. The terrified do not answer polls.
María Elvira Salazar, you represent Florida’s twenty-seventh district. You have called on the Department of Homeland Security to shield Cubans with pending immigration cases and no criminal records from deportation. You have urged the resumption of suspended citizenship processing. You voted for the seventy billion dollars anyway. The rhetoric is a perfume that does not quite cover the smell. The mother whose asylum was denied in October is not listening to your rhetoric. She is listening for the knock your funding bought.
Mario Díaz-Balart, the money your vote appropriated has already bought the plane that will carry the next group back. Carlos Giménez, the elderly man in the shelter is a constituent of yours. You cannot wash the vote off your hands.
The prophets of Israel knew this mechanism and named it: Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!
Isaiah knew the hand that signs the unrighteous decree. Isaiah knew the knock that comes in the morning. The knock is the policy you designed and the seventy billion dollars that funds it. The knock is the sound of the country your parents left and the country you are now returning people to. The knock will not distinguish between the regime and the refugee. The knock will not wash off the hand, will not leave the jaw, will not release the diaphragm.
The column is the knock at the door. It brings the testimony of the witnesses—the ones who were beaten in the street, the ones who crossed the border, the ones whose asylum cases were denied and whose work permits were rescinded and whose agents came to the door. Thou hast testified falsely. Woe unto the false witness, for the woe comes down upon the place where the lie began. The girl who will ask what she did wrong—the daughter who has been waiting for the answer—she asks the question. The question has no answer that the pen can write.