MIAMI — A group of 21 migrants arrived on shore of a Florida Keys state park Friday morning, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
The group consisted of 16 men and five women, including one who is pregnant, according to county 911 dispatchers. They arrived at the park, located around mile marker 67 on U.S. 1, around 8:30 a.m.
The nationalities of the people were not immediately known, a sheriff’s office spokesman said.
The landing comes as the Keys is experiencing the largest volume of migrant arrivals — mostly people from Cuba and Haiti — in nearly a decade.
Cuban arrivals on small, homemade boats are almost a daily occurrence in the island chain, and several large groups of people from Haiti have arrived on overloaded sailboats since November 2021.
Migrant boats have become such a common sight in the Keys over the past two years that it’s not unusual for tourists to see them while they’re on vacation. That’s what happened to Alan Heyman and his son, who shot video of a vessel coming from Cuba with what appeared to be a dozen or more people on board off the Middle Keys city of Marathon on Wednesday.
The Heymans, visiting from Long Island, New York, saw the boat while fishing on a charter boat, he said.
“We spotted the boat and the captain contacted the Coast Guard. It looks like the boat was stopped by (federal agents), but I’m not sure what happened after that,” Heyman said in an email.
In the video, the boat, with several Spanish phrases as well as a Nike swoosh, painted on the hull, is seen cruising along, before being encountered by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations boat.
Since the increase in arrivals began about two years ago, most people stopped at sea are almost immediately placed on a Coast Guard cutter and returned to Cuba. Those who make it to land, however, are technically placed into removal proceedings, meaning they are released to local family and friends with orders to check in with federal immigration officials.
The process can take years before a person is ordered back to Cuba, and the Cuban government has not accepted deportation flights from the U.S. since 2020. Sources say this means an unofficial return to the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy that ended in early 2017 that allowed those who set foot on U.S. soil to stay in the country and apply for permanent residency after a year.
Those intercepted at sea were returned to Cuba, as they mostly are now.
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