By Dave Sherwood
HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba has yet to discuss migration with the Trump administration, Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told Reuters, even as the U.S. plows ahead with a vast immigration crackdown that could leave many Cubans at risk of deportation.
The Trump administration is planning to revoke legal status from some 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans allowed to enter the U.S. legally under temporary humanitarian “parole programs” launched under former U.S. President Joe Biden, Reuters reported last week.
The move under consideration would be part of a broader effort to end Biden-era parole programs that allowed some 1.8 million migrants to enter the United States.
But the Trump administration has not yet broached the subject of migration or any potential increase in deportations with Cuba, de Cossio told Reuters in an interview late Tuesday at Cuba`s Foreign Ministry in Havana.
“There has been no request of that nature from the U.S. government,” de Cossio said. “We have yet to even sit down to discuss if that would be a possibility.”
The White House, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Under existing migratory accords, which date back to the 1980s, Cuba has routinely accepted immigrants deported from the U.S. by air and by sea.
Two such repatriation flights have landed in Havana since January, de Cossio said. Most carry fewer than 100 deportees.
But large scale deportations of Cubans initially admitted lawfully into the United States were never contemplated in the migratory accords between the two countries, the vice minister said.
“When the agreements were made, the possiblity of the United States admitting people, and then unadmitting them, was not at the time seen as something reasonable. So anything (like that) would need to be discussed.”
De Cossio declined to say whether Cuba would be willing to cooperate with such an arrangement, calling it “unrealistic and unfair.”
Cuba has long alleged the U.S. stokes mass migration by attacking its economy with sanctions while at the same time incentivizing Cuban migration with laws that offer them a clearer path to citizenship than other nationalities.
“They didn`t tear down a wall, they didn`t have to jump a fence to get into the U.S., they were invited,” de Cossio said.
The United States says Cuba is to blame for its migration crisis, accusing the island`s communist-run government of mismanaging the economy and violating human rights.
Cubans rank among the top groups crossing the U.S.-Mexico border both through Biden-era legal entry programs and illegally in recent years.
Upwards of one million Cubans have left the island since 2020, roughly a tenth of the population, an exodus demographers say has few parallels outside of war.
The U.S. and Cuba last met to discuss migration in December, before Trump took office, and are next slated to meet in April in Washington, though de Cossio said the Trump administration had yet to confirm that meeting.
(Reporting by Dave Sherwood, additional reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
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