There was a time not so long ago when US immigration officials would have rolled out the red carpet for Cuban immigrants like May Díaz.

The 36-year-old native of the city of Camaguey joined thousands of other Cubans in spontaneous nationwide demonstrations against the Communist regime on 11 July 2021. Like many other protesters, Díaz was beaten up by truncheon-wielding police officers who were deployed to crush the protests, and three months later she fled the island and landed in the Mexican resort city of Cancún.

A cross-country journey brought the musician to the Mexican border town of Mexicali. Díaz then entered US territory with a group of about 15 other undocumented foreign nationals on 13 October 2021. For much of recent US history Díaz would have been instantly and legally admitted to the US under the privileged treatment accorded to Cuban nationals as political refugees from a communist dictatorship during the cold war era and beyond. Joe Biden was president when Díaz was taken into custody by US border patrol agents, and she was released on her own recognizance within days of her arrival in the country and traveled to New Jersey to stay with friends.

Díaz later applied for political asylum and held a series of odd jobs in Texas and Florida while she awaited adjudication of her request for permanent residence. But her fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse when Donald Trump’s draconian crackdown on undocumented migrants unfolded throughout 2025.

In October of that year, the single mother of a 12-year-old girl learned that her application for asylum had been rejected by the US Customs and Immigration Services. A month later her work permit was rescinded.

Then came an unannounced visit to her Houston apartment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in March of this year. Díaz was fortunately not at home at the time – but when she learned of their stopover, she hurriedly packed her bags and moved to Miami. Her situation is hardly unique, and Díaz is living in mortal terror of a knock on the door of the residence where she is staying.

“Through his immigration policies, Trump is trampling on what this country has always stood for, a place of refuge for the poor and the vulnerable,” said Díaz. “There is no difference between a Cuban who is languishing in a prison cell on the island and a Cuban living here who has no possibility of finding a job.”

An estimated 68% of Cuban American registered voters in Florida cast ballots for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, far and away the highest level of endorsement he garnered from any Latino community in the US And he has rewarded that steadfast support by deporting far more Cuban nationals during his initial 17 months in office than he did during the entirety of his first term in office.

As of April of this year, nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals had been expelled from the US since Trump returned to the White House, according to ICE’s own statistics. That is more than double the 3,385 who were ousted between 2017 and 2021. Most of them have been dumped on the Mexican side of the border, and many are older people with serious health conditions who had been living in the US for years or even decades, according to a recently released report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) watchdog organization.

“The Mexican government is not offering them any way to obtain durable legal status outside of the asylum system, leaving many in limbo with no shelter, no medication, and at the mercy of criminal organizations,” warns Alcira Silva Hava of HRW’s refugee and human rights division.

Longtime Cuba analysts say the Trump administration’s decision not to exempt Cuban nationals from its onslaught against all undocumented foreign nationals reflects the priority Trump attaches to engineering the collapse of communism in Cuba over comprehensive immigration reform.

“Trump doesn’t want more [Cuban] immigrants, but he does want regime change,” says Susan Eckstein, professor emerita in the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and the author of three books on Cuba. “He’s been obsessed with being anti-immigrant, and Cubans are among the largest groups [of foreign nationals] who are coming into the US.”

Administration officials insist they are merely upholding the law of the land in this context. But in the case of the nearly 2,000 Cuban nationals who have been repatriated in the past 17 months, they are forcibly returning them to a country facing an imminent military threat from Washington. The returnees will also be hunting for jobs in a moribund economy being asphyxiated by an ever-harsher US naval blockade.

“The Trump administration remains committed to enforcing federal immigration law and deporting illegal aliens who are unlawfully present in the country,” one White House official said. “As the president stated, Cuba is a failed country that has been horribly run for many years. Its flailing leaders should make a deal with the United States before it is too late.”

A key player in the Trump administration’s Cuba policymaking process is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Florida-born son of Cuban immigrants who is widely expected to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican party in the 2028 elections. Regime change on the island might bolster his prospects.

“He would rather have [would-be] immigrants stay in Cuba and protest and rise up,” says Eckstein. “It then becomes their issue rather than a result of external pressure.”

The aggressive round-up of undocumented Cuban nationals has helped make Miami the leader in deportations among metropolitan areas nationwide since the beginning of this year. It has also put its three Republican Cuban-American members of the US House of Representatives in a bind.

Representatives.María Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez have loyally toed the administration’s line on immigration policy, and on Tuesday all three supported legislation to channel $70bn to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for ICE and the border patrol. Trump signed the bill into law a day later and under its terms, ICE will receive more than three times its last annual budget through the end of the President’s current four-year term.

None of the three legislators granted an interview to the Guardian despite multiple requests.

In her rhetoric at least, Salazar has sometimes displayed some independence from the White House. She has publicly called on DHS to continue shielding from deportation Cubans along with migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who have pending immigration cases and no criminal records. She has also urged DHS to resume suspended citizenship processing and naturalization ceremonies for Cuban applicants, as well as Venezuelans, whose cases have been delayed.

Will staunch Cuban American supporters of the Republican party switch their allegiance to the Democrats over Trump’s expulsion of their countrymen? Don’t count on it.

“While Cuban Americans are still aligned with Trump, there appears to have been a significant retrenchment among some of them,” notes Eduardo Gamarra, a professor of political science at Miami’s Florida International University and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum. “Trump’s approval rating has fallen from 68% [in the 2024 election] to 53% this year. But that core is as Trumpist as they were two years ago.”