The Age of Fear: Former Congressman Joe García's Message to Cuban Exiles

Back in 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential bid with a tirade against Mexican immigrants—branding them as "murderers and rapists"—many turned a blind eye. "That's not about us," they said over dinner. "We're different. We are the Cuban exile community."

Later, as he targeted Muslims and, as the 45th president, implemented his first travel ban, the support continued. After all, "burkas we see, faces we do not know."

In September 2024, during the closing stretch of the presidential elections, Trump clearly stated his intention to abolish the Humanitarian Parole and the CBP One application. This threat was widely publicized, yet a significant portion of the exile community chose to ignore it, even as many had just brought family members from Cuba using that program, or had friends protected by that status. It simply didn't matter to them. By then, the MAGA candidate had delivered another fierce anti-immigrant speech at his Doral golf course, met with enthusiastic applause.

On election day, they handed him a blank check, condemning thousands of compatriots, including families and friends, to an unprecedented "Age of Fear" in 66 years of exile. No one could claim they weren't warned.

Impact of the New Administration

As the new administration began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—himself a son and grandson of Cubans, with a grandfather who avoided deportation thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act—swiftly revoked TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees. The same punishment followed for Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Hondurans. Many in the Cuban community justified this by labeling them as "lazy, gang members, or people of low character."

By March 2025, Trump had abruptly canceled the Humanitarian Parole programs for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. Over half a million people, including around 110,000 Cubans, were at immediate risk of deportation. Again, many turned a blind eye to the injustice, even applauding insults from a resentful and failed individual on a screen, who derogatively referred to their loved ones. An old "comrade" from a Havana radio station who only "realized" the repression in Cuba nearly 20 years after living in Miami.

Escalation of Anti-Immigrant Measures

The grim history of repression against Hispanics was just beginning. When ICE's masked gangs began hunting and arresting people on U.S. streets based on skin color or Spanish-speaking, there were some complaints, yet again, a significant number of our compatriots looked away, while the chorus repeated the refrain of "gang members and criminals." The reality was different: many of those arrested were construction and agricultural workers, students on their way to school, teachers at school gates.

Not even the shocking images of women pursued in the streets, pregnant and young girls terrified, families torn apart in courts through judicial rulings designed to facilitate mass deportations, stirred much reaction. A simple screen scroll served to anesthetize against the suffering of others.

Focus on the Cuban Community

Then they focused on the Cubans. Initially, they targeted those with I-220B status; then they went after the I-220A. At first, gradually, testing the waters and gauging public reaction. But there were only isolated protests, so they went further: harassing truckers, arresting and deporting non-criminal mothers and fathers to Cuba, some with severely ill young children. Victims of the same dictatorship we all fled from. Elderly individuals with relatively minor offenses committed decades ago were thrown into cells like undesirable criminals. There were deaths. And silence. The deafening silence of this community.

Following this, the anti-immigrant crackdown gained new momentum. In the heart of Miami, the government rapidly constructed the infamous Alligator Alcatraz, a direct affront to Cuban exile pride, which kept its head buried in the sand, unable to articulate a response. ICE filled those cages with immigrants—many Cubans, many innocent of any crime—and treated them like animals (Amnesty International has even reported torture). And what did Miami's congress members do? Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar, and Carlos Giménez applauded the detention camp operations, thus justifying the worst episode of xenophobia in Cuban exile history. Truthfully, they were not alone; a considerable part of the exile community abandoned other Cubans to their fate.

Day by day, the White House intensified its harassment of Cuban refugees. Tens of thousands of Humanitarian Parole beneficiaries—individuals who arrived in the country under a federal program—had their work permits revoked, stripping them of the ability to put food on their tables. When judges from various courts blocked these measures, Trump responded with an assault in appeal courts, replicating the same legal persecution pattern applied to refugees with I-220A status.

Community's Response and Future Concerns

And the exile community? Doing just fine, thank you.

Federal representatives and social media propagandists conspired to attack Joe Biden, the man who opened the doors of the United States to more Cubans than all presidents combined since George Washington. They blamed him for the crisis for accepting a significant number of Cubans under I-220A status, when it was actually Trump who initiated that formula in January 2017.

No primitive demagoguery can erase the truth: Biden's I-220A recipients received work permits, started businesses, bought homes, many formed families and had children. Donald Trump set a record for deporting Cubans in his first term (3,385). And now he resumes the relentless pursuit and deportation with unabated cruelty.

Focused on eliminating the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, Trump's White House is simultaneously waging another of its many battles in the Supreme Court to end birthright citizenship, a real threat to many families in our community. If successful, it would render stateless the children of many exiles, should they have the misfortune to be born before their parents became American citizens.

These are existential questions, not political: Will the Cuban exile community remain silent as immigrants and refugees are demeaned as people from "shithole countries" and "poison to the nation's blood" from those in power?

Will it remain paralyzed in fear or apathy now that Trump has halted all immigration processes—residencies, citizenships—using the attack by a former CIA Afghan collaborator as an excuse? When, for heaven's sake, did Cuban exiles ever commit a terrorist attack against the nation that welcomed them?

Will our community continue to remain silent following the suspension of the Family Reunification Program created in 2007 by George W. Bush?

Will they keep looking away while fanatical extremists like Stephen Miller threaten to denaturalize those who "do not love the country" (that is, those who oppose the Trumpism program, in the purest style of the Cuban Stalinist experiment)?

Will the exile community remain indifferent while ICE conducts its first hunts in Miami?

What will our community do when:

• Raids begin in Hialeah?
• Birthright citizenship is stripped from their children?
• Parents and grandparents are expelled for using legal assistance programs?
• They attempt to denaturalize individuals for engaging in legitimate political activism?
• The Cuban Adjustment Act is eliminated?
• And finally, when they put you against the wall for sharing a simple critical post on social media?

It's no longer about the stranger, the other, the neighbor next door. They are deporting Cubans back to the same communist dictatorship they fled from, established by Fidel Castro in 1959.

You, we, could be next.