VIDEOS: Hear From Recently Deported Cubans
More than 150 Cubans were deported from the United States last week in the eighth deportation flight of the year, bound for Cuba
Video footage of interviews provided by Belly of the Beast, an independent media outlet bringing you hard-hitting, unbiased stories of the Cuban people.
As the U.S. continues to wage its economic war against Cuba, the island nation continues to live up to its agreed-upon obligations to accept deportees. Cuba has consistently received 59 monthly deportation flights since a bilateral agreement was made in 2017, one of many that followed. The latest flight is the eighth of 2025. It transported over 150 Cubans, who were received at José Martí International Airport in Havana, Cuba, on Thursday.
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Like the majority of migrants, the U.S. transports deported Cubans in handcuffs. However, the Cuban government demands that the handcuffs be removed before deplaning. Aside from the inhumanity of handcuffing innocent people, this is also likely to avoid any footage being used by the U.S. in its anti-immigrant propaganda campaigns, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has done many times in the last year under Trump.
While family separations have been a back-burner issue during Trump’s second term, legacy media covered one story about the Trump administration attempting to deport unaccompanied Guatemalan migrant children awaiting reunification with family members here in the U.S. Despite a judge blocking their deportation, that case isn’t over yet. The case had just been reassigned to a Trump-appointed judge, as reported by Kyle Cheney at Politico, who provided the most extensive coverage about the case, leading to national attention.
However, many cases of migrant children being separated from their parents and kept away from their families have been ignored by mainstream media. Cuban, Venezuelan, and many other families have been intentionally separated from their parents as they are either being detained or deported. The U.S. government holds them as long as legally allowed and runs them through the same process as unaccompanied migrant children for no justifiable reason.
While the White House may not be separating children at the border nearly as much as Trump did in his first term, it is still separating families as they are being deported, a story that should be getting much more attention. Whether the children are held for two weeks, thirty days, or longer, the damage these separations do is long-lasting.
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The Trump administration is again weaponizing cruelty as a deterrent, yet data have consistently shown that deterrence policies don’t work and do much more harm than good.
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I’m an independent investigative journalist who enjoys digging deeper into the stories you see on the news. Find my work at Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, Latino Rebels, and more. I’m also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support my work, become a paid subscriber or donate via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.
This is heartbreaking. She is so strong and I'm sure she is very careful about what she says. But how many people are now being sent all over the world with such negative treatment by our government? And, why in the world are we deporting Cubans? This lack of empathy the US is displaying will come back to us tenfold in the years to come.
That poor mother! 😡 and then the First Lady shrugging her shoulders like eh