25 Cuban migrants land on beach and near Key West landmark, U.S. Border Patrol says

The U.S. Border Patrol said Monday that 25 Cuban migrants made landfall in Key West on Monday and over the weekend, as attempts to reach South Florida from Cuba by sea continue to rise dramatically.

Three groups of people arrived separately at different locations in Key West.

On Monday, a group made it to Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park. A day earlier, a group arrived at Smathers Beach. Another made landfall near the Southernmost Point landmark.

“The migrants claim that they departed from the Artemisa region of Cuba,” said U.S. Customs and Border Protection Division Chief Adam Hoffner in a statement.

The migrants will be interviewed and processed for removal proceedings, Hoffner said.

The Key West landings are part of a significant increase in maritime migration from Cuba to South Florida, which the federal government tracks by the fiscal year that starts and ends in October.

Since Oct. 1, 2021, Coast Guard crews have stopped 462 Cubans. They stopped 838 Cuban migrants in the prior fiscal year while the number was only 49 in fiscal year 2020.

The landings have become a common sight in the Keys.

On Friday, 52 Haitian migrants landed on Card Sound Road in the Upper Keys.

Also on Christmas Eve, the Coast Guard announced it had returned 39 people to Cuba following four stops off the Keys earlier in the week made due to “safety of life concerns.”

One was made 10 miles off Stock Island on Dec. 19 and the other three took place Dec. 20 in separate stops off Key West, Long Key and Big Pine Key.

The stop off Long Key happened after Coast Guard Sector Key West was notified that two “overloaded rustic vessels” had been spotted about 10 miles from shore, the agency reported.

On Dec. 18, 37 migrants from Cuba landed in Key West, arriving in two wooden fishing boats, according to the Border Patrol. They told agents they left from an area near Artemisa.

Earlier this month on one day alone, the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protections Air and Marine Operations stopped a total of 30 people in three separate incidents, all between 35 and 45 miles south of Key West.

All 30 people were returned to Cuba aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Raymond Evans.

“We will continue to put a high priority on patrolling offshore to prevent illegal migration, save lives by removing migrants from unsafe environments and deterring dangerous illegal activity,” Lt. Paul Puddington, a Coast Guard District Seven enforcement officer, said in a statement Friday.

Maritime migration from Cuba started spiking in 2020 after sharply declining in the years after the end of the decades-old “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy in early 2017.

That policy allowed those who stepped foot on U.S. soil to stay in the country and apply for permanent residency after a year. Those caught at sea were sent back to Cuba. Now, all Cubans attempting to enter the U.S. without a visa are returned.

The Obama administration did away with the policy in one of its final foreign policy decisions.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.