HRW: 4,353 Cubans deported to Mexico under undisclosed US deal, denied due process

On May 27, 2026, Human Rights Watch released a 66-page report, "'Casting Us Aside to Die:' Cuban and Other Third-Country Nationals Deported from the US to Mexico," documenting a pattern of removals carried out between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026. Over that period, HRW found, the US government deported more than 18,000 third-country nationals, of whom nearly 13,000 — roughly 70 percent — were sent to Mexico under an agreement between the two governments that neither has made public. Cubans were the single largest group, with 4,353 deported to Mexico; many were older adults who had lived in the United States, predominantly Florida, for years or decades before being removed to a country that is not their own. The mass targeting of long-term Cuban permanent residents for removal to Mexico was not a US practice before President Trump's second term.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 53 deportees in Tapachula, Chiapas and Villahermosa, Tabasco, including 41 Cuban men, most of them 60 or older with chronic health conditions. According to HRW, none of those interviewed were given an opportunity to challenge their deportation to Mexico — the individualized review of a person's country of removal that the Immigration and Nationality Act requires — and US authorities removed them without documentation, money, or personal belongings. Of those covered, 55 percent had a prior US criminal conviction, 26 percent had no criminal record, and only 16 percent had a violent or potentially violent offense as their most serious conviction. In US immigration detention, deportees described overcrowding, extreme temperatures, inadequate food, poor access to medical care, and physical and verbal violence by guards.

Once in southern Mexico, the deportees were left without a clear path to legal status. Cuba's government refuses to take them back, and Mexico offers no durable legal status outside an under-resourced asylum system that many decades-long US residents cannot realistically access. Cut off from medications they had taken for years, some have been forced to live in parks or outside hospitals. "They're casting us aside to die," one 58-year-old Cuban national told HRW. The organization called on the United States to provide individualized removal review and humane detention conditions, and on Mexico to guarantee emergency shelter, health care, and a pathway to legal status, accepting transfers only under transparent agreements that comply with due process.