More migrants land in Keys, risking lives to escape ‘terrible situation’ in Cuba
About 40 men, women and some small children entered the next stage in their migration from Cuba to the United States Wednesday when they were processed by the Border Patrol at the agency’s station in the Middle Florida Keys city of Marathon.
They were among hundreds of people from Cuba, and one large group of over 100 men and women from Haiti, who have landed across the island chain since the end of last week. Many in the group processed Wednesday arrived earlier in the day on a rustic vessel just off shore of Long Key State Park.
As agents processed the migrants, Yaneli Pérez peered through the gaps of the station’s gates, looking for her daughter’s father, Alionay Gallardo. Gallardo left the island nation on a boat with roughly a dozen passengers on New Year’s Eve night, because of “the terrible situation that exists in Cuba,” she told the Miami Herald.
He hasn’t been heard from since.
“We don’t know anything about him,” said Pérez, who now lives in Marathon.
She hopes that Gallardo might be among the Cubans who have spent days in the Dry Tortugas after their boats landed in the isolated federal park about 70 miles west of Key West. Her daughter is worried sick over the fate of her father.
Pérez is no stranger to the dangers of migrant voyages. Seven years ago, the native of the northern province of Villa Clara left her home on a migrant boat, eventually reaching the shores of Long Key.
“That journey … it’s a fear, it’s a terror, you never know where you are going. It’s an uncertainty that until you reach the end, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
Despite the risks, Pérez said that “the best chapter of her life” has been the time she has spent in the United States. She is surprised, but happy, with the spate of migrant voyages from Cuba that have arrived in the Keys in recent days
“I am glad that all of them can get here, so that not only they but also their families can have a little more,” said Pérez.
The group of mostly men sat on green and purple blankets laid out on concrete outside one of the station’s doors. A guard asked them for their cellphones, passports and identifications. A woman tried to put an orange shirt on a young child. One man pointed to a boy and said he was 14 years old. Another handed out cups of water to the crowd under the direct midday sun.
The smaller child came back from the inside of the station with fresh clothes and waving an action figure of a basketball player in his hands.
The steady influx of migrant arrivals, mainly from Cuba, but with a large group from Haiti, showed no signs of ebbing Wednesday, with multiple landings reported throughout the Florida Keys in the morning.
The Keys and South Florida have already been seeing a significant jump in maritime migration over the past two years, but it ramped up markedly since Christmas — with well over 500 people from Cuba coming to shore since Friday and about 130 people from Haiti arriving in a packed sailboat off Key Largo Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the trend continued, with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office online calls for service log showing at least four landings since midnight. Arrival locations included Lower Matecumbe Key in the Upper Keys and the Middle Keys city of Marathon.
The situation has become so severe that the federal government on Sunday closed the Dry Tortugas National Park because hundreds of Cuban migrants arrived there since last week, overwhelming the sparse staff of park rangers stationed there.
Also overwhelmed are U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the Keys. Typically, they arrive within the hour to respond to a migrant landing. Since last week, the response time ballooned to hours to a whole day, according to Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay, who’s become frustrated with the situation because it’s tying up his deputies.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not have the exact number of migrants it has encountered since Oct. 1, the beginning of the fiscal year. But, the agency said in a statement Tuesday that “encounters” were up 400% compared to the same period last fiscal year.
The Coast Guard is also stopping far more people than it had this time last year — which was already the busiest the service had been patrolling the Florida Straits for migrants in nearly a decade. Since October, Coast Guard crews have intercepted more than 4,150 Cubans at sea, according to the latest available numbers. That’s on pace to far exceed the 6,182 interdicted in all of fiscal year 2022.
Since Oct. 1, the U.S. Coast Guard says it has repatriated 1,036 Haitian migrants, but that number is expected to rise after Tuesday’s landing in Key Largo. Last year, 7,175 Haitians were repatriated between Oct. 1, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2022.
Miami Herald photojournalist Carl Juste contributed to this report.
This story was originally published January 4, 2023 at 10:50 AM.
