The United States is considering resuming migration accords with Cuba at a time tens of thousands of people are leaving the island to come to the U.S., Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday.
Officials from the two countries will meet in Washington on Thursday to discuss the current crisis.
“I don’t want to get ahead of the dialogue between the United States and Cuba, but everyone knows we have had migration accords with the country of Cuba for many, many years,” Mayorkas said in a press conference after a regional meeting in Panama to tackle migration challenges in the Western Hemisphere.
“Those were discontinued, and we will explore the possibility of resuming that, and that is a reflection of our commitment to legal, orderly and humane pathways so individuals, including Cubans, do not take, for example, to the seas, which is an extraordinarily perilous journey.”
After the rafter crisis in 1994, when 35,000 Cubans took to the seas attempting to reach U.S. shores, the U.S. agreed to issue 20,000 immigrant visas annually to Cubans, but that stopped under the Trump administration. In interviews with foreign media accredited on the island, the Cuban vice minister of foreign affairs, Josefina Vidal, urged the United States on Tuesday to “comply” with the agreement.
Mayorkas did not provide specifics about possible accords under consideration.
Cubans have been leaving the island at a dramatic pace in the past months, driven by the deterioration of living conditions and increased government repression against opponents after widespread protests last year. The numbers grew even higher since November, when Nicaragua eliminated visa requirements for Cubans, allowing them to fly there and then make their way on land to the U.S.
Just in March, 32,141 Cubans arrived at the southwest border with Mexico, and almost 80,000 have come since the beginning of the current fiscal year in October. In the same period, the island’s government has not accepted deportations of its nationals from the U.S., according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The number of Cubans trying to cross the Florida Straits is also on the rise.
On Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard repatriated 67 Cubans to the island following five interdictions off the Florida Keys.
The Coast Guard said it has stopped 1,399 Cubans attempting to cross the Florida Straits since October, up from only 49 in the fiscal year 2020 and 838 in 2021.
Many Cubans who reach the border are allowed to begin the asylum process, but a majority of those who are interdicted at sea are repatriated. Most Cubans who have been legally admitted at the border can apply for a green card after living one year and a day in the U.S., thanks to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.
Legal immigration from Cuba has become very difficult in the past few years.
Most consular services were suspended in Havana in late 2017 over the unexplained incidents affecting diplomats and provoking symptoms similar to a concussion that have been labeled “Havana syndrome.” U.S. security agencies have not yet found the culprit, but the U.S. Embassy in Havana said it would start resuming limited visa processing in May.
The suspension of visa services in Havana and the pandemic created a massive backlog of more than 90,000 cases affecting Cubans wanting to emigrate and reunite with their families in the U.S. A separate family reunification program that has not taken new cases since 2016 left another 22,000 cases in limbo.
Currently, most Cubans going through the legal immigration process have to make an expensive travel to Guyana for interviews with U.S. consular officials. Pandemic restrictions have also slowed down visa processing worldwide.
As a result, only 3,232 immigrant visas were issued to Cubans in the fiscal year 2021, according to statistics released by the U.S. State Department.
Vidal, the Cuban foreign affairs vice minister, told The Associated Press that Washington’s immigration policies are “incoherent” and “differentiated” and criticized U.S. sanctions.
But some Cuban exiles criticized the administration for holding the migration talks.
“These negotiations are the result of the migratory pressure that the regime has exerted against the American government in recent months,” said the Assembly of Resistance, an umbrella organization comprising several exile groups. “It is nothing surprising. Every time the rebellion of the Cuban people grows, the regime offers an escape valve. The United States must not capitulate to this blackmail.”
Another group, the Center for a Free Cuba, said the Cuban government had used migration as a political weapon for more than six decades.
“No immigration conversation with the regime in Havana, framed in terms of the manipulation and use of Cuban refugees as a negotiating weapon, can be successful for the Cuban people or the interests of the United States, at a time when hundreds of Cubans are being tried in summary trials and sentenced to exorbitant sentences simply for exercising their right to express their desire for Cuba to be free,” said John Suárez, the group’s executive director.
