A Cuban who has been residing in the United States for almost 18 years was warned by an Immigration officer after returning from a trip to the island with his wife and children at the end of January not to go to Cuba again because they will soon begin to remove residences.
"He told him that they were going to start removing residences, that maybe it wasn't today or tomorrow, but that they were going to remove residences because how are you going to leave a country saying that you are fleeing and you are going to return to it?", he explained in statements to Javier Díaz, toUnivision, the wife of the Cuban who was given such a warning.
The woman explained that the incident occurred on January 29, the day they returned to Miami from Cuba.
"They checked our passports, they sent my husband to enter the 'immigration room', they checked his passport, they let him go and when we were reaching the exit door, another officer asked for his passport, he checked it again and She asked him if he had entered through the border, but he said it was by boat," the woman explained on condition of anonymity.
Despite telling him that he had taken advantage of the Cuban Adjustment Act and that he had been in the United States for almost 18 years, where he hadGreen Card permanent,The Immigration officer insisted on recommending that he not return to the island.
He also clarified,that even if you became an American citizen, citizenship can also be removed by fraud. The family that experienced this incident has traveled an average of eight or nine times in the last six years.
Questioned about the case by lawyer José Guerrero, the lawyer said that "it is not a surprise," although in this case he was surprised given the more solid immigration status of the Cuban who was the subject of scrutiny.
"It's no surprise, we have been talking about this issue for months. Nobody wants to create panic, but we are alerting people to what is happening"Guerrero said.
In November of last year, US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)questioned the situation of Cubans who are welcomed as refugees in the United States and then travel to Cuba, a country from which they supposedly fled political persecution.
His statements - highly controversial - came during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the Biden Administration's request for additional funds to quickly process migrants who enter the country illegally.
Addressing the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, the senator raised the case of Cubans who acquire refugee status in the United States and a year later are on vacation in Cuba, a country from which they supposedly fled for political reasons. .
Claiming to know this situation first-hand, Rubio explained to Mayorkas the “privileges” enjoyed by Cuban refugees and the practices they carry out protected by them, such as sending aid money to Cuba (food stamps), or the possibility of staying up to three months in the country from which they supposedly fled, among others.
“If a year later you are here as a refugee, but you return to Cuba six times, shouldn't you at least lose your refugee status?” Rubio asked the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Mayorkas who promised Rubio that he would study the matter and offer a response based on the legal arguments surrounding the issue.
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