Hurricane season is not over. It will do so on Wednesday of next week, but the transfer of rafters in the Florida Straits has the US Coast Guard working overtime locating people in the area and returning them to Cuba.
According to the coast guard, on Tuesday 185 Cubans were repatriated and handed over to the Cuban authorities in the port of Matanzas, a new reception location, since until now the Cabañas Bay was used.
The group was detained by US authorities between November 14 and last weekend, an average of 23 per day.
In a statement, the coast guard detailed that the Cubans were detained in 12 different operations.
When announcing the new repatriation operations, Captain Ben Golightly, of the Seventh Coast Guard District in Miami, once again insisted on the danger of these trips, which in many cases end with deaths.
“The Coast Guard and our partners are working to stop migration-related deaths at sea by rescuing people in rough and unsafe vessels,” said Golightly, who reminded would-be migrants should not pay people smugglers.
But they don’t seem to care. This same Wednesday, another 19 rafters from the island were intercepted by Border Patrol agents in Key Colony Beach, south of Miami. There were no injuries at the scene, said Agent Walter N. Slosar, chief of the Border Patrol’s Miami Sector.
Several immigration lawyers have warned about the zero tolerance that the authorities are showing towards the rafters. “They process them expeditiously, many times without giving them the opportunity to appear before a judge, or have an interview to present their case, and there have been cases in which they have returned to the almost obsolete practice of transferring them from a cutter. to another and return them without touching land,” he told OnCuba the lawyer Carlos Simes.
Latest figures: from October 1, 2022 until this week, 2,243 Cubans were intercepted trying to reach US soil by sea. In the previous fiscal year, 6,182 Cuban migrants were detained. This despite all the campaign that the authorities are carrying out making it clear that every detained person will be repatriated to their country of origin.
