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‘Like we were dogs’
For Scull Delgado, life in the US began with the infamous Mariel boatlift, a 1980 expedition that saw 125,000 Cubans pile into small, rickety boats and cross the Florida Strait.
Many were fleeing political persecution. Some were overwhelmed by the island’s financial crisis. Scull Delgado said he boarded the boat to escape the Cuban military.
But even if the “marielitos” arrived in the US without papers, Washington agreed to accept them. The US, after all, had long opposed the communist leadership on the island.
“We will continue to offer an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from communist rule and freedom from poverty,” US President Jimmy Carter said at the time.
Over the next few decades, Scull Delgado settled in California and married a US citizen. He had three children and four grandchildren. But he also had a criminal record.
“I committed a crime in the 90s,” he said, describing it as “sneaking out” from prison.
“When I got out, I didn’t have any more problems,” added Scull Delgado. They only had to “appear annually for entry” at US immigration offices. “That’s where he picked me up.”
Immigration officers arrested him as he entered the office. After nearly 46 years in the US, he is one month away from retirement – one month away from enjoying “the benefits I get from my job”.
“I feel betrayed by Mr. Trump because he took everything away from me after living in this country my whole life,” said Scull Delgado.
By November, he was transferred to Mexico, far from his home and family.
Another Cuban citizen, 48-year-old Orlando Martinez Mendoza, was also deported in 2025.
He emigrated from Cuba to the US in 2015, arriving by boat. But he said immigration officials arrested him at a criminal hearing in Tennessee, where he appeared on a speeding charge.
He explained that he was transferred to three different prisons in two months in Tennessee. He was then removed from the state, to a prison set up at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola.
Martinez Mendoza remembers the transfer that happened because of the media.
“They chose a group of us immigrants saying that we are the biggest criminals in the country,” he said. “They took us to an Angolan prison in a bus with police in the front and back, traffic jams and sirens, and TV cameras rolling.”
Later, he was also sent to Arizona and, from there, to Palenque. He said his bus stopped in front of the offices of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, or COMAR.
The immigration authorities, he said, “threw us before COMAR like dogs”.
The US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration, did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.
However, they showed Martinez Mendoza on the website of people arrested for immigration, showing that he has a conviction for selling cocaine in 2018. He was ordered to be deported after serving two years in prison.
