Senate candidate Angie Nixon calls the president the “deporter-in-chief”
14ymedio, Madrid, October 13, 2026 / Ready to fight for the Cuban vote, despite the challenge this initially poses, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Florida, Angie Nixon, recalled in a televised appearance this Monday the high number of people from the island who have been deported during the two Administrations of the current US president. “Donald Trump is the deporter-in-chief,” she said on CBS News Miami’s Facing South Florida program.
Nixon lamented that 13,000 Cubans have been deported during the time Trump has been in office, despite his having received strong support at the polls from Cuban Americans. The figures come from adding together different sources. On the one hand, the number of deportees during the Republican’s first term is official and comes from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, which puts it at about 3,400 Cubans. There is, for now, no corresponding estimate for this second term, but Human Rights Watch calculates that there are around 8,500 Cubans.
In addition, there are those sent specifically to Mexico, some 4,400 Cubans according to the report published in May of this year by the same organization
In addition, there are those sent specifically to Mexico, some 4,400 Cubans according to the report published in May of this year by the same organization. In that 66-page document, the NGO lamented that 26% had no criminal record whatsoever and pointed out that only 16% of those who did have one had committed a serious or violent crime. A large majority had lived in the US for decades, and their expulsion to Mexico had left them highly vulnerable, as they suddenly found themselves in a foreign country, without rights and without access to housing or medicine.
In total, 18,000 people were deported between January 2025 and March 2026, of whom 13,000 ended up in that country. The figure shows that more than a third of those expelled were Cuban, a nationality that for decades has not exactly been the target of US immigration authorities, which had protected exiles from the island.
Nixon lamented that all of this has changed under the Trump Administration, which has also put an end to the specific programs for receiving the Cubans who left en masse from 2022 onward due to a combination of factors that included socioeconomic deterioration, the intensification of repression after 11J [the island-wide anti-government protests of July 11, 2021], and the reopening of borders once the worst of the pandemic had passed. The Democrat neglected to mention that Barack Obama was the president who, in the final days of his term, in January 2017, eliminated the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which allowed Cuban rafters to remain in the US.
The cancellation of the parole program – which allowed Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants to come to the US provided they were sponsored by a resident of the country – went so far as to reach the Supreme Court, where it was definitively revoked in May 2025, ending the permits of more than half a million people.
Deportations of Cubans had been minimal not only because of the immigration exceptions that applied to exiles from the island, but also because of the regime’s opposition to accepting the return of citizens who had left the country. That policy changed when, in April 2023, the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Joe Biden Administration agreed to resume deportation flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but from that date until December 2024 the number of Cubans returned to the island from the US amounted to approximately between 1,000 and 1,200.
Since then, the number is unknown, and although most months a charter flight arrives in Cuba with around a hundred people, Washington has found other ways to rid itself of the Cubans that Havana refuses to take back. One of them – apart from the Mexican route – is sending them to third countries, including some in Africa.
The immigration debate promises to be at the center of the debates in the state of Florida, although the polls continue to give the Republicans the advantage. In the Senate race, Republican Ashley Moody has around 49% of the vote averaging most polls, while Nixon is at around 43% using the same method.
Translated by GH
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