The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit closed the case of Yoel Pitaluga Núñez and Dayami Roldán Cruz on Wednesday, a Cuban couple who challenged their detention and expedited deportation, by partially dismissing their appeal due to lack of subject matter and partially affirming the lower court's lack of jurisdiction over their claims.
According to the resolution of case 25-13646, signed by judges Luck, Anderson, and Dubina, the couple was deported while the appeal was ongoing, which deprived the court of the opportunity to provide an effective remedy regarding their detention.
The story of this couple began in January 2024, when they legally entered the United States through the CHNV humanitarian parole program — established by the Biden administration for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans — and settled in Florida.
On July 6, 2025, they were detained in Key West during a traffic stop for a window tint violation, in a joint operation between local police and ICE. That same day, expedited removal orders were issued against both; they both refused to sign them.
The couple had submitted applications for permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, with approximately nine months of processing by the time of the judicial hearing in September 2025.
The Citizenship and Immigration Service indicated that those applications "were not ready to be adjudicated in the near future" and that there was no date set for resolving them.
The legal battle
His lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition with the Southern District Court of Florida, arguing that the expedited removal procedure was inappropriate because the couple had entered on parole—and that this status excluded them from such a procedure—and that the Suspension Clause of the Constitution guaranteed their right to challenge the detention.
On October 29, 2025, they presented an emergency motion to suspend the deportation, which the Eleventh Circuit denied on November 17 of that year.
Days earlier, the government had already notified the court that the deportation had been carried out during the processing of the appeal.
The ruling from this Wednesday addressed two separate issues. Regarding the challenge to the detention, the court dismissed it due to lack of object: since the petitioners had been deported, they were no longer in custody and had effectively received the habeas remedy of release, therefore the court could not grant any further relief.
"As the petitioners challenge their detention, their claim is now abstract on appeal because they are no longer detained, due to their removal from the country during the processing of this appeal," states the resolution.
Regarding the challenges to the expedited removal procedure, the court confirmed that it lacked jurisdiction: the REAL ID Act of 2005 limits habeas corpus in these cases to verifying only whether the petitioner is a foreign national, whether there is a removal order, and whether the individual has permanent resident status, refugee status, or asylum status.
Since the couple did not raise any of those three allegations on appeal, the courts could not review the validity of the orders.
For the , the case illustrates a critical procedural dynamic: once deportation is carried out during an appeal, the challenge to the detention becomes moot, and the scope of judicial review is drastically reduced.
If the petitioners were deported with a pending residency application, that application is considered abandoned, and they will have to wait five years before they can re-enter the United States legally.
El caso de este matrimonio cubano refleja las complejidades del sistema migratorio estadounidense. Sigue de cerca las novedades sobre deportaciones, apelaciones y derechos de los inmigrantes en nuestra sección de
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