Cuban detainees launch protest at Krome detention center, line up to form SOS signs
Dozens of Cuban detainees being held at the Krome detention center launched a protest Thursday morning inside the immigration facility in southwest Miami-Dade, saying they are fed up with prolonged detention.
Many of the detainees have been stuck in an endless limbo, they told the Miami Herald, because Cuba won't accept them back and the U.S. won't release them. Some have been in detention since last year.
Dressed in gray sweatsuits, the detainees wrote 'SOS Cuba' on their shirts with pens. They also lined up in the recreation yard to spell out 'SOS' with their bodies and 'Cuba' with white cloth. They sat on the floor and refused to return inside.
Speaking on the phone with reporters the night before, one of the men said the Cubans were united in the effort and planning to start a hunger strike. They heard they might be transferred to a prison in Texas.
'It's an injustice,' he said. 'We don't want to be moved to another prison.'
Many of them had just arrived at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility this week, after they were transferred from Glades County Detention Center, another immigration facility near Lake Okeechobee. They said that they were given poor food and suffered from lack of medical care at Glades. The youngest are in their twenties and the oldest are in their seventies.
'Clearly with Trump, everything has changed, and they are taking everything to the limit,' one detainee from Venezuela who witnessed the protest told the Herald.
The Krome Detention Center is one of five facilities across Florida that holds immigrants in ICE custody. According to data released by ICE on May 12, about 800 people are detained there, though there were as many as 1,100 last week, according to U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who toured the facility on May 29. The Miami Herald reached out to ICE for comment about Thursday's protest.
Across the facility's different dormitories, other detainees heard the noise. 'They are screaming 'freedom,' among other things,' said the Venezuelan detainee.
One Cuban detainee, speaking to reporters on the phone from the detention center, said they were protesting because they feared being sent out of Florida or to a third country like South Sudan. The Trump administration recently deported two Cubans with criminal records to the East African country.
He said that he wasn't joining because he didn't want to hurt his own case, but he supports what his fellow countrymen are doing. He said he had a message for local politicians and President Donald Trump: 'Have a change of heart.'
At around 11 a.m., guards at the facility started moving protesters inside, but some remained in the yard. 'They're fighting them, they're fighting them,' one detainee said on the phone, observing from his room. He said that guards were confronting the protesters.
A protester who had returned inside spoke to reporters through a tablet.
'The abuse doesn't stop,' he said.
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