Miguel Ángel Alba Rosario, a Cuban doctor held in a federal detention center in Texas, has been in immigration custody for over a year without any court resolving his situation, according to a report by Univision published this Wednesday.
"It has been horrible. Look, for a year now I have had to be both mom and dad; I have three brilliant kids in school," said Sandra, Alba's wife, in a statement to the television station.
Alba entered the United States in 2022 with the immigration form I-220A and was arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on November 4, 2025, in Houston, Texas, when he attended a routine immigration check appointment.
Since then, he has remained detained at the IAH detention center in Livingston, Texas, a federal facility that Cuban detainees have described as a place with overcrowding, stifling heat, and hygiene deficiencies.
"I am here in Texas Livingston, in a federal prison with poor conditions. As of today, I have been incarcerated for more than a year," declared Alba himself from the detention center.
An immigration judge denied his asylum application despite the fact that he has no criminal record and has the support of his family.
His wife, also a doctor, solely takes on the upbringing of their three minor children, one of whom is a legal resident in the country.
During the interview, the doctor's eldest son sent a text message asking about his father, highlighting the emotional weight of a separation that has now lasted over 12 months.
Alba summed up her situation with a phrase that encapsulates the drama of hundreds of Cuban families in the same limbo: "I am a family man. I am overcoming myself."
Before emigrating, Alba participated in a Cuban medical mission in Brazil —part of the Mais Médicos program— and she voluntarily abandoned it, a decision that resulted in sanctions within Cuba's public health system and prevented her from practicing on the island again. After arriving in the United States, she worked as a medical assistant at a clinic in Houston.
The legal defense of the doctor filed a petition for habeas corpus on October 20 before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (case Alba Rosario v. Sanchez, No. 26-40653), aiming to halt his deportation and secure his release. As of the time of this publication, the court had not issued a final ruling.
The legal landscape is particularly hostile: just three days after the petition was submitted, the full Fifth Circuit ruled —with 10 votes against seven— that certain immigrants in mandatory detention do not have an automatic constitutional right to an individual bail hearing, a decision that directly impacts Cubans detained in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
"That circuit, unfortunately, does not guarantee that you won't be removed from the country," warned one of the lawyers involved in the case.
Other Cuban doctors with I-220A have faced similar detentions, including Dr. José Enrique Batista Méndez, arrested in San Antonio in June 2025, and Álvaro Zapata Inza, also a defector from a mission in Brazil, detained that same month in South Texas.
The I-220A is a supervised release form that ICE extensively used to release migrants while their processes were ongoing, but the Board of Immigration Appeals determined that it does not equate to the humanitarian parole required by the Cuban Adjustment Act to apply for permanent residency, thereby blocking this avenue for thousands of Cubans who arrived between 2021 and 2023.
A recent analysis on what is really happening with Cubans with I-220A in the courts describes a scenario of increasing legal uncertainty.
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