A Boston judge is seeking clarification from the Government after it claimed that these operations are being carried out following a verbal pact.
14ymedio, Madrid, March 26, 2026 / William Young, a district judge in Boston, has requested clarification from the U.S. Government after the Trump administration said it has an “unwritten” agreement with Mexico under which it has deported 6,000 Cubans.
The lawyers for Jorge Juan Navarro, a Cuban deported to Mexico after 30 years living in the United States, filed a complaint in court arguing that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violated his rights by sending him to Mexico.
The case is pending while another court decides whether the expedited deportations being carried out by the Administration are legal or not. In the meantime, Young has asked for clarification on how it is possible that a method lacking transparency is being used systematically to deport detainees.
The Government’s lawyer initially told the judge that he would provide a copy of that agreement, but later claimed that the agreement was verbal.
According to Reuters, the magistrate was outraged. “What? Can this be true? Is there some unwritten agreement between two sovereign nations under which 6,000 Cuban citizens have already been sent to Mexico? Is this agreement secret?” he asked.
“What? Can this be true? Is there some unwritten agreement between two sovereign nations under which 6,000 Cuban citizens have already been sent to Mexico? Is this agreement secret?”
Young, appointed as a judge by Republican Ronald Reagan, warned that “judicial deference” has its limits and that he will not allow the role of the judiciary to be ignored in the face of large-scale deportations that lack a transparent legal framework.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to the agency’s request for information.
According to the judge, the previous administration, under Joe Biden, established agreements to expedite cases in which a migrant’s country of origin is reluctant to accept them—apparently four countries including Cuba—but within the framework of the humanitarian parole and CBP One programs, which facilitated the legal arrival of hundreds of thousands of Cubans and other nationalities.
Last week, Luis Rey García Villagrán, director of the Center for Human Dignity, told 14ymedio that in Tapachula alone there are about 500 Cubans deported by the United States who have been “abandoned in the early morning over the past month in different locations. These are people who have been left in migratory limbo.”
It is believed that around 30,000 Cubans are stranded in the region due to the closure of the northern border under the Trump administration, a figure that adds to the more than 15,000 asylum applications stalled in the offices of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) and the National Migration Institute.
In October, the situation was already causing international concern, without clarity on how Cubans were ending up arriving in Mexico this way, although many migrants stated they preferred that destination to returning to the Island.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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