EAGLE PASS, Texas — A smile spread over the face of Yoima Paisan-Viltre, a Cuban migrant, after passage over the emerald waters of the Rio Grande and through release by U.S. border guards. A bandana with the red-white-and-blue of the U.S. flag held her curly black hair.
“I can hardly believe it. I have arrived,” she squealed.
Arrival was in a small border town of 29,000 on the Rio Grande that’s morphed into one of the biggest venues for attempted entry into the United States. Paisan-Viltre was one of the lucky migrants. This thinly populated Texas border region is the top route in for Cubans.
The current exodus from the island nation likely will exceed the historic 1980 Mariel boatlift.
About 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. then. Through May this fiscal year, about 140,000 Cubans have been caught by federal immigration agents — at a time of overall high migration not seen in more than two decades.
They typically make passage with flights to Nicaragua, which loosened visa requirements. Then, they travel by land through two more Central American countries and into Mexico
The vast majority — nearly 98% — have not been expelled quickly under the controversial public health order known as Title 42. Instead, they’ve been allowed entry into the U.S. and either receive humanitarian parole or will face immigration judges where they can launch a defense for staying.
Their treatment illustrates the deep chaos of a system governed by law, policy memos, court injunctions — and diplomatic relations that can snag all the above.
Paisan-Viltre views it in simple terms of liberty and love. She came for liberty, she said, and the need to put the economic collapse of her native land behind her. Her husband made his way to Houston ahead of her, she said, proudly showing a photo of him on her cell phone.
Why now?
The arrival of so many Cubans now is the result of a cluster of economic and geopolitical forces.
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Dr. Michael Bustamante, a Cuban historian at the University of Miami. “For starters, Cuba is in the midst of its worst economic crisis in 30 years. That crisis predates COVID. That was made a lot worse by it for an economy that depends as much as Cuba’s does on something like tourism.”
Key to the increasing numbers are the politics of the region. Nicaragua, a Havana political ally, said Cubans could come into their country without a visa last November.
“All of a sudden, Cubans had a closer point of visa free access to the mainland Americas … from which they could begin a journey north,” Bustamante said.
Many Cubans are processed and released into the U.S. with humanitarian parole, which is part of immigration law rather than Title 42 public health law. Humanitarian parole would put Cubans on a path to legal residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a feature within the complicated immigration laws. But Cubans are clearly averting a Title 42 expulsion that usually comes within hours of arrival across the Rio Grande.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesman said he had no statistics on how many Cubans actually received humanitarian parole.
Another CBP spokesman said the light use of Title 42 may be limited for several reasons, including “Mexico’s capacity to receive those individuals.”
Sending Cubans back to Cuba, under Title 42, isn’t an easy option, note migration experts.
“We don’t have full diplomatic relations with Cuba,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former DHS official who worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations from 2005 to 2011 and is now at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “And we need to be able to work with those governments to accept their people back. We can’t just randomly fly people into a country… They have sovereignty, too. And so we have to be able to work with the government to accept their people back.”
Cardinal Brown said she hasn’t seen this much chaos in immigration policy before. In 2000, immigration arrests by the Border Patrol reached about 200,000 or more a month — like recent months at the southwest border, according to CBP. Unaccompanied minors, traveling without a parent or legal guardian, have a specific policy for them, for example.
“What you can actually do is determined more day to day by what the latest court decision or injunction,” she said, noting that a new court decision provides stronger protections for migrant families with fears of violence.
“None of these migration phenomenons is a product of one single thing, right? It’s the product of a sequence of things. And that also means that there’s not a single solution.”
Chaos for some is an opportunity for Cubans, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C. nonprofit.
“It’s the least risky time in modern memory,” he said. “Even the Mariel boatlift was more dangerous.”
Stark differences
On private ranch land near a pecan orchard near the Rio Grande, the ground was littered with remnants from migrant travel. Mexican SIM cards for cell phones, a child’s sneaker, an empty purple backpack. In the dusty earth lay multiple empty bottles of suero, a rehydration serum that’s the holy water of migration.
Nearby, Sergio Rojas and other migrants made their way in single file as several Border Patrol agents instructed them to walk toward green and white Border Patrol buses in the scrubland. Beyond Rojas in the northern sunlight were the rusty bollards of the border wall. Rojas wore grey shorts, a T-shirt and wet sport shoes that squeaked slightly as he walked.
Why did he come to the U.S.? “Because of the repression” of his homeland, he said. His group said they were all from Cuba.
But the disparate treatment of migrants can be seen starkly by crossing the river into Mexico. Many from El Salvador and Honduras can be found in the streets in Piedras Negras, where they have been expelled under Title 42.
Across the river, the Mexican sister city that looks much more prosperous than Eagle Pass and is five times larger, murals fill the streets near the international bridge. One shows a pair of hands, one painted with the colors of the U.S. flag, the other with the Mexican flag in a handshake.
But the city sits in the Mexican border state of Coahuila, and the U.S. State Department warns visitors to reconsider travel there because of crime and kidnapping.
In Piedras, migrants gathered in the streets near a Catholic shelter and at a city park near the border bridge. “Frontera Digna” reads a sign at the shelter, freshly painted in banana yellow and sage green. None of those who agreed to be interviewed were from Cuba, but rather from Central America.
The Central Americans told stories of hardship, of wanting to give up, but also, of being fearful of returning to their birth countries because of targeted violence against family members. La renta and machetazos, extortion and cuttings by machete, filled a conversation with one family of asylum-seekers.
One 16-year-old pulled up his shirt to show scars on his thin back that looked like a series of zig zags. “The gangs want him,” said his Salvadoran mother.
In Mexico, life is hard and they sleep at a church, she said. They’ve been on the road for a year.
“They say, ‘Speak up. Tell them about your case.’"
But when the family crossed the river in mid-May, she said no one asked them about the family’s fears. She said they must stay anonymous because of their fears of torture and abuse.
“I don’t want to go back to Honduras. I just can’t,” she said, as she buries herself in her husband’s embrace. After a sob, she finishes her sentence, “to suffer more.”
Down by the river, the toggle between anguish and joy is stark. In Eagle Pass, the mood among Cuban migrants was elation.
At Mission: Border Hope on the outskirts of Eagle Pass, Cubans have arrived at the warehouse refuge for free meals, a change of clothes or to get assistance in arranging trips into the interior of the U.S. Often, their first stop is the transportation hub of San Antonio, which is less than three hours away.
On a recent afternoon, weary Cubans were set to depart for locations inside the U.S. Asked how he felt, a Cuban man responded, almost musically: “Bee-you-tee-full,” he said in accented English as he hopped into the bus.
