Florida Cubans who voted for Trump feel betrayed as deportations reach their own families

Cuban-born immigration lawyer Ismael Labrador in Miami voted for Donald Trump, but he says he was blindsided by the scale of the deportations.

Since the Trump administration launched its crackdown on undocumented immigrants two years ago, Labrador's waiting room in Miami is never empty. His appointment book is packed with relatives of detained immigrants trying to secure their release before they are deported back to their countries of origin.

Labrador says relatives are living in fear and, unfortunately, some relatives have been deported back to Cuba. Although business is booming, he wishes it was not.

Cubans have traditionally enjoyed favoured immigration status in the United States under provisions enshrined in 1960s-era legislation called the Cuban Adjustment Act. But widespread arrests across Florida by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have left the Cuban American community more vulnerable than they had ever imagined, Labrador says. In his words, if you do not have a Green Card in the United States, you may be a target.

Countless mobile phone videos have recorded arrests in places previously considered off-limits: parents detained outside schoolyards, at bus stops, at youth sporting events and even inside courthouses at pre-arranged immigration hearings. Few have had the impact of the footage of 39-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant Grace Calero and her 19-year-old daughter Giulianna Carriel being arrested in a hospital ward.

Two months ago, the pair were driving to work in Kissimmee, central Florida, when they were hit by another car and taken to hospital in an ambulance. While they were being treated for their injuries, ICE agents burst in and arrested them, and they were deported back to Ecuador within days. Labrador's own cousin has also been caught up in the dragnet of ICE detentions; despite his best efforts, he was unable to prevent his relative from being deported back to Cuba. In his words, it is hard when you are fighting against a lot of resources.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said the president was elected on a promise to deliver mass deportations and is delivering on that. A White House spokeswoman told reporters last week that he stopped the invasion of the country and that, as a result of his policies, more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the US. ICE, meanwhile, has said it is targeting anyone who has broken American immigration law and is in the country illegally.

Labrador was among the 68 percent of Cuban Americans in Florida who voted for Donald Trump two years ago, a decision he roundly regrets today. On the campaign trail in 2024, at rallies including in Florida, Trump repeatedly said that on Day One he would launch the largest deportation programme in American history.

Labrador and many thousands of disillusioned Latino voters like him thought the administration would only deport people with criminal records. He says they were blindsided; he voted for Trump because he wanted criminals out of the country and wanted a safe America, and they never thought he was going to go after everybody.

Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who represents Florida's 27th Congressional district, recently released a video filmed outside the White House in which she distanced herself from the deportation policy, saying it had gone too far. Addressing President Trump, she said the same Hispanics who helped him get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today. Salazar is locked in a tight race against another Cuban American, the Democratic Party's candidate Eliott Rodriguez, and her close association with Trump on immigration could potentially cost her the congressional seat.

Florida remains a Trump stronghold. At a recent gathering of Cuban American entrepreneurs in Miami, the atmosphere remained staunchly pro-Trump. Real estate businessman Juan Omar Sixto said Miami loves Trump and Cuban Americans love Trump, and that they agree anyone who crossed the border illegally should be out, despite acknowledging he illegally entered the US himself six decades earlier.

A poll released on Thursday by Florida International University found that not all South Florida Cubans agree: 76 percent said they disapprove of the Trump administration's deportations of Cubans with no criminal record. But their support for the Republican Party remains steadfast, with 68 percent saying they plan to vote Republican in November. In the last election, Trump beat Kamala Harris in Florida by 56.1 percent to 43 percent, the biggest margin of victory for a candidate in the state since 1988, in part because of the support of Latino communities.

In other parts of the country, support among Latinos is declining. A recent NBC News/Telemundo poll of 8,000 registered Latino voters showed nearly 60 percent favour seeing Congress come under Democratic Party control, to just 35 percent wanting a Republican victory. The high cost of living is a big factor in the discontent, as residents feel supermarket and petrol prices are impossibly high for working families.

For many Hispanics, the discontent is also partly because of stories like Heydi Sanchez's. Sanchez left Cuba in 2019 as the island spiralled into economic collapse and illegally crossed the border from Mexico into the US. After nine months in a detention centre, she was released under an i-220B Order of Supervision, which grants the right to remain in the US but carries the constant threat of deportation. She settled in Tampa, where she worked with autistic children and the elderly, and after a complex and expensive fertility struggle she and her husband had a baby girl called Kailyn.

Last year, President Trump revoked temporary humanitarian parole for about 300,000 Cubans. Sanchez knew something was wrong when her regular ICE meeting was brought forward without warning. At the appointment she was detained, Kailyn was taken from her arms and passed to her father, a US citizen, and within a day Sanchez was on a deportation flight back to Havana in shackles with no recourse to appeal.

In Cuba she now lives in a one-bed apartment in Mayabeque, a rural province outside Havana. Of being separated from her daughter, she says it is like the sky fell in and crushed her; on video calls her daughter says, Mummy, come home, and she says Mummy is away working, asking what else she can tell her and how she can explain it. Despite expressions of support from several US politicians, including Maria Elvira Salazar, more than a year has passed since her deportation and Sanchez remains in limbo in Cuba. In a statement, ICE said that in this case the parent stated they wanted to be removed without the child and left the child in the care of a safe relative in the United States.

While the Trump administration has rolled back Cubans' special immigration privileges, it has sent thousands of people back to an island Washington itself describes as a failed state. Cuba is in the grip of its worst ever energy crisis amid a months-long fuel blockade imposed by the US. Since overwhelmingly voting for Trump in 2024, Cubans in Florida now realise they are just as vulnerable to deportation as any other diaspora, and his Republican colleagues may feel the brunt of their frustration at the ballot box.