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Dylan, a 32-year-old Cuban from Cojímar, spent 10 months detained in an ICE facility in California awaiting a deportation that would never take him back to his country. One night, he was taken out in handcuffs, placed on a bus, and after more than 40 hours of travel, he was abandoned in Villahermosa, Tabasco, without documents, money, or any guidance.
According to a report by El Periódico de Aragón, when he was called to the infirmary of the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California, Dylan thought it was a medical procedure. Instead, two agents were waiting to take him out of the facility along with a group of about 30 men and five women.
After 15 minutes on the bus, they arrived at the border with Mexico, where their handcuffs were removed and they were transferred to another vehicle. One of the detainees, realizing they were not heading to any airport, began to scream; the agents took him back. The rest were left in the hands of the Mexican authorities.
They passed through Monterrey on their way from Mexicali and finally arrived in Villahermosa. The phrase with which they were taken off the bus was: "You are free now. You are in Mexico. You can go." Dylan summarizes it like this: "I didn't think they would let me go without a guide or documentation. I didn't know what to do."
His story began in 2021 when he fled Cuba on a fisherman’s boat with his sister and ten other Cubans, amid a humanitarian crisis on the island. After 12 hours at sea, they arrived in the Florida Keys. The following year, his parents made the same journey, and the family settled in Miami, where Dylan worked cleaning windows of skyscrapers. He never regularized his status: he tried to apply for political asylum, but a lawyer asked for $8,000, which he could not afford. “I got complacent,” he admits.
His detention came about due to a minor infraction, he says. One morning on his way to work, he failed to yield at a crosswalk, the police asked for his documentation, and from there he ended up in the hands of ICE. "I never thought I would be detained by ICE. It's terrible; those people don't play around. When you fall into their hands, you become a movable object," he recounts.
Before being transferred to California, he spent 18 days in a Miami holding cell designed for 20 people, where around 50 were crammed in. "It was such a huge wave of deportations that they themselves collapsed the spaces they had," he recalls. In Calexico, he was summoned up to five times to testify before a judge via video call; in every instance, the response was the same: the case was postponed. He requested self-deportation three times through tablets available in the hallway of the center, until he was finally called that night.
After three days on the streets in Villahermosa, Dylan was found by Rey Tejadilla, a Cuban musician seeking refuge in Mexico. "I picked him up in a church where I went to sing," Tejadilla recalls, having seen dozens of Cubans arriving in the same situation. "They are left in a limbo. They're brought here, left on the streets, with everything that implies," he states.
Cuba gave Dylan 10 days to return to the island "on his own," but, as Tejadilla points out, "he had nothing." So he decided to normalize his situation in Mexico, where he now lives with a family that took him in and works as a maintenance assistant at a gym.
His hope is that his mother, who already has legal residency in the United States, will one day be able to initiate a family reunification process. "If it were up to me, I would leave with my dad and mom tomorrow. I hope it doesn't take more than five years. I want to enter the U.S. legally this time," he says.
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