“Just like we were dogs.”
For Skal Delgado, life in the United States began at the famous Mariel Boatlift. In 1980, some 125,000 Cubans boarded rickety boats and escaped across the Florida Straits.
Many were fleeing political persecution. Some became desperate as a result of the island’s economic conflict. Scal Delgado said he joined the boatlift to avoid serving in the Cuban army.
But even though the “Marielitos” arrived in the United States without providing formal documentation, Washington agreed to take them in. After all, the United States has long opposed the island’s communist leaders.
President Jimmy Carter said at the time, “We will continue to extend our generous hearts and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from communist rule and economic deprivation.”
Over the next few decades, Scar Delgado settled in California and married an American citizen. He had three children and four grandchildren. But he also had a criminal record.
“I committed a crime in the ’90s,” he said, explaining that his time in prison for it was a “gaffe.”
“Once we got out, we didn’t get into any more trouble,” Scal Delgado added. He had to “appear annually for signature” at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “So they came and picked me up.”
Immigration officials arrested him as he was signing into the office. After nearly 46 years in the United States, he was one month away from retiring, and one month away from reaping the benefits of his “work.”
“I feel betrayed by Mr. Trump because I’ve lived my whole life in that country and he took everything from me,” Scal Delgado said.
By November, he was deported to Mexico, away from his home and family.
Another Cuban, Orlando Martinez Mendoza, 48, was also deported in 2025.
He immigrated to the United States from Cuba in 2015, arriving by boat. But he said immigration authorities caught him at a court hearing in Tennessee where he appeared on a speeding charge.
He explained that he was transferred to three different detention centers over a two-month period in Tennessee. He was then transferred out of state to a detention facility set up at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola.
Martinez Mendoza remembers that this transfer was done for media purposes.
“They singled out a group of us immigrants, saying we are the biggest criminals in this country,” he said. “The police took us to the Angola prison in a bus with police in front and behind us, sirens blaring, traffic stopped and television cameras rolling.”
Eventually, he too was sent to Arizona, and from there to Palenque. He said the bus stopped right in front of the offices of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR).
He said immigration officials “threw us like dogs in front of COMAR.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees federal immigration enforcement, did not respond to requests for comment on the story.
But it does feature Martinez-Mendoza on its website about immigration-related arrests, highlighting his 2018 conviction for selling cocaine. He was subject to a deportation order after serving two years in prison.
