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Yuniel Abreu Campos dreamed of rebuilding his life in the United States. He crossed the border in May 2022, was working, had no criminal record or traffic tickets, and was in the process of obtaining his residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act. However, on Thursday, November 6, he was deported to the island on the flight with the highest number of Cubans expelled from U.S. territory: 232 people.
"Many injustices were committed because they did not allow me to go through the due process," said Yuniel from Cuba, in statements to Noticias 23 de Univision, which revealed his case in a report by journalist Daniel Benítez.
The migrant had been arrested months earlier after voluntarily attending a court where his case was dismissed. Despite having a parole, two pending appeals before the Board of Immigration Appeals, and a residency application, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) proceeded with his deportation.
For almost five months, Yuniel was held in immigration detention centers in Krome and Louisiana, where, as he reported, he suffered procedural violations, including the absence of representation in a bail hearing.
In the United States were his partner, Yeni Fernández, and her children, who depended on his work. "We are very sad, my children and I. They sent him back to the dictatorship, to a place he escaped from," the woman lamented.
Hernández also explained that her husband “had his own company” in the United States, where he worked legally and without a criminal record. “He didn’t have a single traffic ticket. He was just another worker, a person who fled from a dictatorship,” she said in the report.
Her lawyer, Lissette Tocado, described the case as an "arbitrary deportation," noting that an active appeal before the Board of Appeals implies an automatic stay of deportation, which should have prevented his expulsion. "He had everything in order, and yet they sent him back. They did not respect the judicial processes," she told Univision 23.
The flight that was sent back to Cuba, the tenth of the year from the United States, set a record for the number of repatriated individuals. According to information from the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) published on its official page, the group of 232 migrants arrived at noon on November 6 at José Martí International Airport in Havana.
Among them, there were 189 men, 42 women, and one minor; three were transferred to investigative bodies for alleged crimes committed before leaving the country.
According to data, with this flight, there have been 38 immigration returns to the island so far in 2025, totaling 1,376 individuals repatriated from various countries.
Since Donald Trump's arrival in the presidency in January, ten air deportation operations have been carried out, during which 1,231 Cuban migrants were returned, demonstrating a sustained tightening of immigration policy and a stricter enforcement of the limited bilateral agreements with Havana.
Public records from the state of Florida show that a person with the same name, Yuniel Abreu Campos, registered the company Abreu’s Construction Group LLC in December 2024, headquartered in Sarasota, although CiberCuba has not been able to independently confirm whether this is the same Cuban deported by ICE.
The information matches what his wife stated in the Univision 23 report, in which she claimed that Yuniel had his own construction company before he was detained.
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