Big trouble for the Cuban exception

Politico

a day ago

POWER OUTAGE — Until Friday, Cuban immigrants occupied a special place in American immigration policy.
From the Mariel boatlift to 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' policy to the sheer transformation of Miami as the so-called capital of Latin America, over the past 60 years Cubans have played a key role in rewriting the rules on immigration — sometimes carving out their own exceptions in U.S. immigration law.
But a Supreme Court majority last Friday may have dealt a lasting blow to the traditionally privileged status of Cuban immigrants. The Trump administration now has the green light to end the Biden-era Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) parole program and eliminate the legal status of over 500,000 immigrants, including Cubans. Never before have so many Cubans been on the verge of losing status — let alone being deported en masse.
Cubans, via the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, have long enjoyed their own specific path to citizenship; after living in the United States for a year, Cubans are fast-tracked towards obtaining permanent residency. And Cubans under that law have been exempted from other provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
Politicians have tried (and largely failed) to replicate those special protections for other immigrant groups — most recently for Venezuelans. But none of those groups have achieved the political clout and influence needed to secure the kinds of benefits Cubans have enjoyed for nearly six decades under U.S. law.
The Supreme Court's recent decision allowing the Trump administration to cancel the parole program puts in limbo tens of thousands of Cubans who hadn't been in the U.S. long enough to qualify for the Cuban Adjustment Act's protections. That's in addition to the 40,000 Cubans with deportation orders against them.
It's not the first time Cubans have seen their unique status in immigration law pared back. In 2017, the Obama administration nixed the Clinton-era 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' policy which granted Cuban refugees who were intercepted on U.S. soil automatic asylum as part of its efforts to reopen diplomatic relations with Havana. And the first Trump administration opted to enforce a deal with Cuba to accept deportation flights from the U.S., even as it reinstated other sanctions and measures against the island's communist government.
But the scale of the potential deportations now is expansive — and tinged in irony. After helping deliver Florida twice to Trump, Cubans have never had more influence in Washington.
Cuban exile politicians are at the peak of their power. Marco Rubio, the former senator and son of Cuban immigrants, is one of the most influential American diplomats in recent memory, the first individual since Henry Kissinger to hold the national security adviser and secretary of state positions at the same time. On Capitol Hill, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), another Cuban American, is the vice chair of the House Appropriations Committee and wields considerable influence within a narrow GOP House majority over the flow of legislation.
That influence has only magnified with House Republicans' slim majority. The 'crazy Cubans' –– as Speaker Mike Johnson has dubbed Díaz-Balart and his South Florida colleagues Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gímenez –– have wielded their influence in concert with Rubio's policy priorities.
But the Trump administration has been adamant about making good on Trump's vow of the largest mass deportation in U.S. history — with the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller pressing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to ramp up arrests to 3,000 a day and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pushing forward on canceling temporary programs, including CHNV.
Deporting the thousands of Cubans suddenly out of status could go a long way toward reaching the numbers Trump promised on the stump. Only there's one big problem: Miami's Cuban voters are overwhelmingly Trump voters.
Florida International University's Cuba poll released just after the 2024 election showed a staggering 68 percent of Cuban Americans cast their ballots for Trump, nearly twice as many as in 2016.
To cast out Cubans would be political suicide for the GOP and could cost them in the midterms, says Dr. Eduardo Gamarra, a professor and pollster at FIU.
'Now there are more Republicans than there are Democrats in Miami Dade County, it may have reached its apex,' Gamarra said, while cautioning that 'these shifts are not permanent.'
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, the South Florida Cubans in Congress will attempt to thread the needle between breaking with Trump on deportations and defending the Cuban population that delivered them their political power.
For their part, they are vowing to fight to preserve Cubans' pathways to citizenship. Diaz-Balart wrote on X shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that they are working with the Trump administration 'to make the case and find a permanent solution for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who have fled political crises and cannot return to their countries of origin because of legitimate claims of persecution.'
More specifically, the South Florida members are holding out hope they'll convince the Trump administration to keep the Cuban exception.
'They need to be treated a little bit differently,' Gímenez told reporters at a press conference in Miami following the court ruling.
'They're a part of our community, they're part of our economy and they need to be treated as such,' Gimenez added. 'So we're going to be looking for some adjustments to what the enforcement mechanism of this ruling is going to be.'
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Marisa Guerra Echeverria contributed to this newsletter.
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