The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Félix Lázaro Aldama-Gihon in Kentucky, a 56-year-old Cuban who had legal permanent residency, which he lost after being sentenced to 20 years in prison for fatally stabbing his girlfriend.
The arrest took place on July 10 and was carried out by the ICE fugitive operations team in Louisville, Kentucky.
Aldama-Gihon has been under a final deportation order since 2019, so he is currently undergoing a legal process that must culminate in his expulsion from the United States.
"Our team works diligently every day to locate illegal aliens with criminal records," stated José Aguirre, interim deputy director of field operations for ICE in Louisville, on X.
"Thanks to the tenacity of our agents, this violent individual is behind bars, the community is safer, and we have contributed to delivering justice," he added.
According to official information, the Cuban fatally stabbed his girlfriend multiple times, a crime for which a court found him guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
After serving his sentence, he automatically lost his status as a lawful permanent resident— a direct consequence of a felony conviction under U.S. immigration law— and an immigration court issued a final deportation order against him in 2019.
Despite that resolution, Aldama-Gihon remained in U.S. territory until the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) unit of ICE Chicago, with an operational presence in Louisville, located and arrested him.
The case adds to a series of arrests and deportations of Cubans with criminal records that ICE has intensified in recent months.
Just days earlier, on July 8, ICE confirmed the deportation of another Cuban convicted of attempted crime, Luis Álvarez García, as part of the same zero-tolerance policy towards immigrants with a criminal record.
This policy gained significant momentum in February 2026, when the Cuban regime accepted for the first time to receive deportees with convictions for serious crimes, something that had blocked the execution of expulsion orders against citizens of the island for decades.
Since then, ICE has completed at least 18 direct repatriation operations to Cuba, with a total of 612 Cubans expelled in the first five months of 2026.
The first flight, conducted on February 9, transported 170 people, at least 50 of whom had convictions for serious crimes.
According to DHS data cited in reports this month, more than 42,000 Cubans have pending final deportation orders in the United States, of whom at least 29,000 have criminal records, a group that immigration authorities have declared a priority target in their fugitive operations.
The arrest of Aldama-Gihon in Kentucky also serves as a reminder that the presence of Cubans under deportation orders is not concentrated solely in states with large diaspora communities like Florida, but is spread throughout the country, including interior states like Kentucky, where ICE has conducted raids against undocumented Cubans in recent years.
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