Ariel and Elena Lara moved from Cuba to South Florida where their son was recently born and they had faith in the American Dream.
The father said he had believed in Marco Rubio’s promises about President Donald Trump, but being in a detention center in Texas changed that.
“Rubio said during an interview that now we had a president who was going to give the Cuban people a hand,” Lara said during a phone conversation.
Lara said he was so out of touch with his new reality that when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him two weeks ago he had assumed that he was meeting for an interview with officials who were considering granting him residency.
On Tuesday, Ariel Lara’s relatives feared that since he was registered as an “anti-government activist” in communist Cuba his deportation could have severe consequences.
“This is madness,” Elena Lara said in Spanish.
Wilfredo Allen, an experienced Miami-based immigration attorney, said he is representing Ariel Lara, who benefited from the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, or CHNV, parole program.
The parole program ended recently after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s injunction that had temporarily blocked the Trump administration from terminating it.
Allen said Cubans living in the U.S. are still able to apply for protections under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law enacted in 1966 to address the large influx of Cubans seeking asylum over Fidel Castro’s communist rule.
“In the last 20 years, I have never seen so many people so afraid,” Allen said adding that he expects many more migrants to fall through the cracks under Trump’s pressure for more deportations.
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