MIAMI — U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended three Cuban men who arrived in the Florida Keys Friday morning.
The men were found on the shores of Plantation Key in the Upper Keys around 8:45 a.m., said Adam Hoffner, division chief for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Miami operations.
It wasn’t immediately clear in what type of vessel they were in. Hoffner said they told agents they came in a rustic boat, usually meaning a homemade, often barely-seaworthy, craft. Agents have not found a boat so far.
“Agents are searching the area to locate the vessel,” Hoffner said in an email to the Miami Herald/FLKeysnews.com.
Friday’s arrival is part of an ongoing surge in maritime migration to South Florida from Cuba and Haiti. Since Oct. 1, the Coast Guard has stopped 1,451 people from Cuba at sea attempting to come to the United States, said agency spokeswoman Petty Officer Nicole Groll. That’s the highest number in five years.
The Coast Guard and other federal agencies track migration by the fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to the end of September every calendar year. In all of fiscal year 2017, the Coast Guard stopped 1,468 Cuban migrants on the Florida Straits.
That year was also the final year for the so-called “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, which allowed Cubans who set foot on U.S. soil to stay and apply for permanent residency after a year. Those caught at sea were sent back to Cuba. The policy, which the Obama administration ended in its final months in office, served as an incentive for Cubans to make the often-dangerous maritime journey.
Now, most people caught either on the water or on land are sent back to Cuba. As a result, the Coast Guard saw a precipitous drop in migration between Cuba and South Florida. in the years immediately following the policy’s end.
But deteriorating political and economic conditions on the island nation have driven people to take to the seas in large numbers once again.
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