catherine philp | DISPATCH Heidy Sánchez remains in Cuba, eight months after she was separated from her one-year-old daughter and American husband at an immigration appointment Heidy Sánchez video calls her daughter on her 45th birthday from CubaJason P Howe for the times Catherine Philp, San José de las Lajas Sunday January 25 2026, 6.25pm GMT, The Times Heidy Sánchez was still breastfeeding when the immigration agents ripped her baby daughter from her arms. “She is an American citizen,” they told her. “She has to come with us.” Handcuffed and taken to a cell, she was joined by two women, one Honduran and one Cuban, before they were marched to a van and taken on an odyssey of Florida’s detention sites, ending up at Miami airport. Two days after her daughter was taken from her, Sánchez landed back in Havana on a plane full of deported Cubans. “Everyone else was saying, ‘We aren’t staying here,’ and already making a plan about how they would leave again,” she recalled, sitting in the sparse apartment she now inhabits in a Soviet-era block outside Havana. “My breasts were leaking milk and all I could think of was when I would ever see my daughter again.” Carlos Yuniel Valle and Heidy Sánchez with their daughter Kaylin Cubans were once the VIPs of irregular migration to the United States, afforded privileges unavailable to other Hispanics thanks to Cold War laws sheltering those escaping Fidel Castro’s communist regime. Top stories 1 2 3 4 5 That changed in part in 2017 when President Obama removed the “dry foot, wet foot” policy allowing legal entry to all Cubans who made it on to US soil. But Cubans would not experience the shock of being treated like all other migrants until President Trump began his drive to remove all non-citizens, revoking Cuba’s automatic refugee status and the temporary special humanitarian programme afforded to arrivals under President Biden. Brazilian migrants are stopped on the US-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico, in 2019paul ratje/AFP Suddenly Cubans were being pursued as aggressively as other migrants: detained, as Sánchez was, during a routine immigration appointment in Tampa to regularise her status. Top stories 1 2 3 4 5 At least 1,600 Cuban citizens have been repatriated under Trump, according to the government in Havana, while thousands more have been deported by land to Mexico. The moves have sent shockwaves through the 2.4 million strong Cuban-American community, most notably in Florida where it forms a powerful voting bloc for the Republican Party. Of the Cuban-Americans in Florida, 68 per cent voted for Trump in 2024. Cuban-American Republican representatives who have gone along with the deportation drive stand accused of betraying their community in return for Trump’s vows to pursue regime change in Cuba. Sánchez’s case went viral after her American husband, Carlos Yuniel Valle, shared an emotional video appeal on social media. He had been called to the immigration office in Tampa to pick up his daughter, Kaylin, then 17 months old. Husband makes emotional plea after wife and mother deported to Cuba Sánchez had been under an I-220B, an immigration parole order, reporting regularly to the authorities since arriving at the US border with Mexico in 2019 and seeking asylum. During that time, she met and married Yuniel and had their daughter, a dream achieved through IVF treatment. Sánchez had known she had fertility problems since she was a teenager but that most treatments to help her conceive were no longer available in cash-strapped Cuba. She was 43 when she gave birth. Landing back in Havana in April 2025 was a stunning shock. Alerted by her husband, her parents were there to meet her and take her home. She subsequently moved into the apartment her husband and his parents had left two decades ago after winning the Green Card Lottery and with it, legal entry to the US. Customs and Border Control agents patrol the wall separating Mexico and Nogales, Arizonacharlie riedel/AP Trump suspended the lottery in December after it emerged that the attacker in the deadly Brown and MIT shootings had emigrated to the US through the scheme. The same month, he expanded country-specific travel bans to include Cuba. Trump had already ended family reunification programme for green card holders. He then extended it to US citizens and pressed pause on all Cuban immigration cases, including pending asylum applications, naturalisation and residency cases. More than 600,000 Cubans have been left vulnerable to imminent deportation because of the changing rules. At least 45,000 have already been issued with active deportation orders. Sánchez’s next appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was not due until May last year, at which she was to pursue her case for family “reunification” as the wife and mother of American citizens. Instead she received a call on April 22 telling her to report at 8am the very next day. The detention sites she passed through included Krome, in Miami, which has been found by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to have squalid and unsanitary conditions, with violence and even torture sanctioned. Many Cubans are detained in “Alligator Alcatraz”, a similarly harsh site in Florida’s Everglades. Sánchez’s lawyer, alerted by her husband, tried to intervene but could not discover where she had been taken. In Cuba’s swamps, Trump has raised spectres of the Bay of Pigs On January 20, on the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration this week, it was Sánchez’s 45th birthday. In the morning, her phone lit up with a video call from her mother-in-law and daughter, singing her happy birthday. She blew kisses to Kaylin and told she loved her before finishing the call. “This is how it is now,” she wept. Jason P Howe for the times Jason P Howe for the times After Sánchez missed Kaylin’s second birthday in November, Yuniel flew over for Christmas with their daughter. Sánchez was overjoyed but riven with nerves about her daughter’s health. She has suffered since infancy with seizures and basic medicine is unavailable in Cuba. Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship, along with his anti-immigration drive, has Sánchez fearing that even her daughter’s US citizenship might not be enough to protect her in future. Other Cubans in Florida live in fear they could be next. Families back home dread the loss of the life-sustaining remittances they send. Iris Arias, 59, a receptionist at a museum in Old Havana, frets daily about her two daughters in Miami, who arrived there two days before Trump was elected in November 2024. The dream of migrating to the US is fading for those in HavanaJason P Howe for the times Jason P Howe FOR THE TIMES “They are afraid to go to work in case they are caught and deported,” she said. One daughter, 30, is a nurse; the other, 22, went to further her studies in metallurgical engineering. “At first they sent money but now they can’t because they’re not working,” Arias said. Billboards in Miami show the faces of Republican representatives with the slogan: “Traidores.” “In a community of immigrants where are the voices to protect us?” it asks. They include the congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who pronounced herself “deeply disappointed” in the Trump administration’s action but still co-sponsors the Dignity Act which would offer sanctuary to all Cubans who arrived before 2021 while allowing the 850,000 under the Biden administration to be deported. For young Cubans still on the island, the American dream is over. Those contemplating exile look to Spain, Uruguay, Brazil and Mexico — almost anywhere but the US. Douglas, who trained as a lawyer but could not find opportunities in the field, works for Cuba’s first independent fashion brand Clandestina, established in 2015 after the communist regime finally relaxed the rules to allow private enterprise. “Down with blackouts,” one T-shirt reads. Behind the counter a print shows palm trees behind the border fence between Mexico and the US. “Utopia”, it reads, bleakly. “America is the last place I want to go,” Douglas said. Douglas at his shop in CubaJason P Howe FOR THE TIMES It is, however, the only place Sánchez wants to go. But she won’t risk doing so illegally. “It is not an option,” she said. “I cannot risk losing my daughter for ever.” Later this month she will take her documents to a long-scheduled appointment at the US embassy to discuss family reunification. The odds are long — the appointment was made in November before the latest raft of rule changes. Everything has shifted. “I have to try,” she said. “Otherwise [I] have no life anymore.” Her daughter does not understand why she only says good night to her mother on a tiny phone screen. Cuba’s glacial internet and frequent power cuts make contact even harder. When the power goes off, the internet goes down and Sánchez goes out on the balcony, waving her phone around to catch a signal. “Sometimes I am doing it for hours,” she said. “And sometimes I can hear her but she can’t hear me.”