A couple of weeks ago, in the waters off Islamorada, Florida, the Coast Guard rescued a Cuban man found clinging to a windsurfing board. The man, Elián López Cabrera, 48, said he had left Cuba the previous day and, running out of supplies, had contacted the U.S. Coast Guard for assistance. He was taken to a hospital to be treated for dehydration and then released by the CBP into America to seek asylum.
The government claims that most Cubans stopped at sea are returned to Cuba, but exceptions abound, which accounts for why they keep trying in increasing numbers. So far this fiscal year, the Coast Guard has interdicted 1,067 Cubans, up from 838 last year.
No one even pretends Cubans arriving by land are routinely deported. During the first five months of the fiscal year, 47,000 of them have arrived at the U.S.-Mexican border, the majority admitted.
So how do migrants from an island nation like Cuba get to our southern border? Todd Bensman of CIS.org answered that question yesterday in a piece titled “A ‘Silent Mariel’ Airlift from Cuba Underway Just in Time for Massive Phase II of the Biden Border Crisis.” In it, Bensman reports that “Cuba and Nicaragua have opened a new air passageway” to that border with Nicaragua’s decision last November to permit Cubans to enter that country without a visa. Bensman writes, “The visa-free air route to Managua and then the overland journey through Central America and Mexico to the southern border replaces the dangerous sea routes Cubans typically took.”
This new air-land avenue for Cuban migrants ensures that they will be able to join the millions of earth’s stateless in achieving the universal wish to live in the United States, a wish on their behalf shared by the current regime in Washington. As Bensman says:
Rather than array forces to stop, block, deter, and take asylum off the table, Biden’s DHS appears to be marshaling resources — people, transportation, housing, and medical services — to expand its capability to usher in all comers as smoothly as possible. . . . Expect the exodus-by-air from the economically troubled island nation of 11 million to fully fill a lane of the post-Title 42 superhighway now under construction to America’s border.
For more, see CIS.org.