Third migrant group in a week lands in the Florida Keys, this time in a makeshift boat
For the third time in a week, U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Florida Keys were called out to respond to a migrant landing.
Early Thursday morning, 10 Cuban migrants arrived in a makeshift boat just offshore of Windley Key in the Village of Islamorada, an incorporated area of the Upper Keys.
Specific information about the landing, including the migrants’ medical conditions and how long they said they were at sea, was not immediately available from the Border Patrol.
The day before, 29 people from Cuba arrived off the mangrove shoreline of Conch Key in a plywood boat with a car engine installed in the middle of vessel for propulsion. Conch Key is just north of the Middle Keys city of Marathon.
Agent Adam Hoffner, Border Patrol division chief for the agency’s Miami sector, said the group consisted of 22 men, six women and a female child.
They told agents they spent two days at sea after leaving the Matanzas province of Cuba two days earlier, Hoffner said.
On Sunday, Border Patrol, Coast Guard and local law enforcement responded to one of the biggest migrant landings in recent history off the Keys, when 356 people from Haiti arrived just offshore of the gated Ocean Reef Club community in north Key Largo.
Maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti to South Florida is at levels not seen in several years because of deteriorating political, economic and life safety issues within both island nations.
