It’s 3 a.m. in Austin and Rodríguez is still awake, the glow of his phone illuminating his face in the darkness. He refreshes the page again. A painting job appears—$150 for a day’s work. His finger hovers over the screen for just a second. Too long. By the time he taps, it’s already gone.
He’s been doing this for months now, ever since President Donald Trump canceled his work permit. Before that, he’d installed speakers at a Tesla facility north of town for 12 hours a day. And before that, he’d served drinks at a nightclub downtown, worked construction, and hauled furniture.
These days, he takes whatever he can find, whenever he can find it, hoping someone will accept his expired documents. His American girlfriend helps when she can, but her brothers won’t even look at him. “Your boyfriend isn’t welcome until he gets his papers,” he said they told her.
Rodríguez, who asked to be identified only by his last name for fear of retaliation, is one of an estimated 125,000 Cubans now living in Texas. He is part of a wave who fled the island over the past five years, seeking safety. Instead, they found a U.S. immigration system that opens doors, then slams them shut: work permits canceled overnight and bureaucratic delays stretching for years.
The flow of Cubans to the United States became a flood after July 11, 2021, when thousands took to the streets demanding freedom. More than 850,000 arrived here from 2022 to September 2024. To manage the influx, the Biden administration created a humanitarian parole process in January 2023, allowing Cubans and others to apply online for legal entry and work permits while awaiting immigration court dates. Then, under Trump’s second administration, humanitarian parole programs were ended, stripping those permits and legal protections from more than half a million people.
The changes created shock waves, particularly among people who historically had benefited from the Cuban Adjustment Act—a Cold War-era policy created in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution that promised many a relatively swift path to permanent residency after a year. Now, technicalities in that law and changes in U.S. policy have disqualified many new arrivals—even some with U.S. citizen relatives. Applicants are required to prove that they entered the country “properly.” They cannot have a prior deportation order or any criminal or immigration court record.
They’re effectively undocumented, and Trump’s ICE is on the hunt.
Here, five recent Cuban immigrants to Texas tell their stories. All agreed to speak on the condition of partial anonymity, fearing deportation or persecution for speaking out. The interviews were conducted in Spanish; quotes are translated. Some details in these accounts could not be independently verified, including expenses or interactions that occurred before the migrants reached the United States. These accounts are based on consistent testimony across interviews, documents migrants provided, and public records.
Rodríguez desperately searches job websites. Morales hides with her children. A 26-year-old who goes by the nickname “El Cubano” watches how the world moves without him. Ayala, a singer, keeps her voice warm on weekends, hoping for a future. None know if they’ll be able to stay or will be forced to leave. Meanwhile, Fernández, already deported, attempts to rebuild his life thousands of miles away in yet another country.
Back home in Cuba, others are waiting—and calculating whether it’s worth trying to follow them.
I. Nothing to Do in Austin
Back in Havana, Rodríguez sold beers at an Old Town bar to earn the $1,500 he needed to flee.
The official bar drink prices were high, so he bought beer on the side for 25 pesos and resold it to tourists for 150 until he made enough for an airplane ticket to Nicaragua. Using advice posted by other migrants on a Cuban WhatsApp group, he traveled, walking most of the 1,800 miles to the Texas-Mexico border.
Along the way, he met a woman from Kenya who spoke no Spanish. Rodríguez knew English, so he translated and helped her navigate checkpoints and negotiate with drivers for a month of the journey. In return, she covered expenses. By the time they reached southern Mexico, he estimates she’d spent over $2,000 to help him—a stranger’s generosity in a landscape of exploitation.
Rodríguez spent eight months in Nuevo Laredo, waiting for an appointment scheduled through CBP One, an app the Biden administration launched in January 2023 to help process asylum applications.
Two years later, on Trump’s first day back in office, the administration announced it would end CBP One’s appointment system. The app was later repurposed and replaced with CBP Home, a platform designed to facilitate self‑deportation reporting.
While Rodríguez waited in limbo, a cousin in Florida offered to sponsor him for humanitarian parole. When approval arrived several months later, he finally crossed the border.
Upon arrival in Austin in July 2023, he had no money, no contacts, and nowhere to stay. Within a month, he found work. Moving jobs, construction, bartending. Then came the car plant, each job a step toward stability. For nearly two years, he had a work permit, a driver’s license, a steady job, and a girlfriend.
Then, under Trump’s orders, the Department of Homeland Security ended humanitarian parole programs that had allowed more than 500,000 immigrants to live and temporarily work in the United States—upending the lives of as many as 110,000 Cubans, 211,000 Haitians, 93,000 Nicaraguans, and 117,000 Venezuelans. Several organizations sued, buying Rodríguez and others a few more days. But, on May 30, the Supreme Court authorized the government to continue cancellations. Two weeks later, the notification went out: His status would be terminated.
That’s when everything fell apart for Rodríguez and many other immigrants living in the United States. Benefits granted under the parole program—such as driver’s licenses and work permits—were canceled for many, though some were able to stay or reapply under other programs, explained Pedro López, an immigration attorney based in Dallas, in an interview.
Now Rodríguez lives off dwindling savings. He has driven for Uber (by using someone else’s account to whom he pays “rent”), sometimes facing hostility even from other immigrants. One passenger, who described himself as Mexican, said Cubans “think they are hot shit” because they’ve long had an easier path to getting papers—even though the Cuban Adjustment Act never applied to all Cubans and many are now under active threat of arrest and deportation.
His mother sends what she can from Cuba. But he sees himself as independent: He’s a 34-year-old who crossed four countries alone to get here. His late-night job searches continue, but now they’re just one piece of a larger uncertainty.
Recently, a police officer pulled him over while he was working. Rodríguez took a deep breath, rolled down the window, and placed both hands on the wheel. He’d prepared for this moment—he was dressed low-key, nothing that screamed “recent immigrant.” When the officer asked for documents, Rodríguez handed over his driver’s license without a word. An Uber customer, who sat in the back seat, spoke up: “Brother, leave him alone. He’s working. He hasn’t done anything.” The cop returned his license and walked away. Rodríguez rolled up the window, exhaled.
Rodríguez got lucky. Even though his driver’s license was unexpired, his immigration status could have put him in potential jeopardy. Trump’s decision to end parole programs meant that his license could have been listed as subject to cancellation in government databases. Any traffic violation could have been the first step to his removal.
“If they stop you even for some kind of traffic ticket, that can turn into a deportation case if you don’t have the right papers,” López said. The Cuban Adjustment Act specifies that Cubans who were “legally admitted or under parole in the United States and physically present for at least one year” can apply for permanent residency, but Cubans who entered under Biden-era parole policies now find themselves in a dangerous limbo.
Rodríguez applied in July 2024 and still hasn’t received a response. Processing times can vary from several months to more than a year, according to immigration attorney Florence Otaigbe, who works with Cubans and other immigrants at her practice in New Jersey.
Wait times depend on the capacity of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which issued a policy memorandum in December pausing benefit requests submitted by nationals of 19 countries Trump has designated “high risk,” including Cuba. The memo also mandates a review of previously approved cases from the past five years. According to the Niskanen Center, the number of Cubans with applications for adjustment of status that had been delayed more than six months increased 140 percent from October 2024 to October 2025.
By themselves, pending applications like Rodríguez’s are flimsy shields, Otaigbe said. “If someone no longer has valid parole and no other status, then they are out of status,” she said. “Applying for adjustment … does not change anything.”
II. Software Engineer at a Dallas Taqueria
Morales spent the five years before she left Havana creating management software. She studied computer engineering, and she’d served as a university professor and worked in software production before founding her own business. Her husband set up a body shop. They owned a house, and she ran her company with a friend. Their life seemed on track, until Cuba fell apart.
Then, she left it all to make tacos in Dallas.
Before, she knew little about tacos. The 38-year-old—who has a degree from Cuba’s University of Informatic Sciences, the country’s top institution in her field—learned to adapt to the fast pace of a taqueria, the constant flow of orders, and the American expectations of speed and efficiency. She had to do whatever she could as an immigrant mom with two kids.
In Cuba, she’d feared for her children and fled for their future. What worried her most was “the lack of teachers in schools and the degradation of its culture, morals, principles.” Her oldest son, 8, had started saying Qué bolá, pura—a slang greeting to his mother—because that’s how his teacher spoke. At home, Morales and her husband tried to teach proper Spanish, literature, and manners: the old-fashioned education they’d received. But since everyone spoke street slang at school, the boy felt as though they also should do so at home.
Morales’ father had already lived in the United States for 10 years and had become a citizen. She figured her children would have a better future here. Otherwise, she’d probably still be in Cuba, “perhaps as a prisoner,” she said. As a busy working mom, she didn’t participate in the massive anti-government protests of July 2021, but she didn’t keep her mouth shut either. She’d always felt the revolution was a facade.
Her father applied for parole for her and the children in 2023—their path to come to the United States—and it was approved in April 2024. Morales thought the humanitarian parole she and her children had received meant safety and an orderly path to legal residency. But that didn’t turn out to be true.
After long shifts at the taqueria, Morales cleaned schools. Her husband had remained back in Havana, and her children cried every day. Her 4-year-old would say: “Mommy, take me to Cuba to see daddy.” They once visited a local park; the girl found it pretty, but her mind wandered. “Can we go down to sit on the beach? Because you know on the other side of the sea is my daddy.”
Morales initially saw signs of hope. The children attended a bilingual school and almost completely mastered English. Here, she figured, they could become academics or entrepreneurs and not meet her professional fate: Her mechanic husband always earned more in Cuba than she did as an engineer.
With her parole, Morales obtained a driver’s license and a work permit—though without a professional license, she couldn’t work in her field. Then, boom. In March 2025, the program ended. They fired everyone in her legal situation from the taco place.
She started cleaning houses. Sometimes she worked at a beauty salon, receiving cash to help out or wash a client’s hair. She got so scared that she stopped driving, left her rental, and began to hide with the kids. She’s seen more of ICE in the media than on the streets, “but it’s instilled terror in the community.”
She applied for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act in June 2025, but as of early 2026, she hadn’t yet received the crucial fingerprint appointment needed to pass a background check.
When Morales realized she had only $43 left, she tried to donate blood and plasma. The first time, she felt nervous and ashamed. Her hands were shaking. She extended her arm, and the nurse stuck in the needle. When they gave her the money, she “didn’t know whether to buy food or pay a bill.” As she recalled this during an interview, she tried to laugh, but nothing came out.
“Right now, I need any income, however small,” she said. She donated twice. They paid her $100 each time. “Sometimes I’d end up exhausted,” she said. “I’ve felt tremors, nausea, and weakness. I really wasn’t prepared to do it with the nutrition I had. Frankly, if I did eat the way I should, what they pay me barely would cover meals.”
Returning, however, is not an option. Her husband wasn’t approved by U.S. officials when the rest of his family got permission for parole, but he still wants out, and Cuba seems to be crumbling. The economy is in free fall, and there’s so much fear. She doesn’t want her children to go hungry, walk barefoot, or be forced into military service. She faces problems in the United States, but at least her kids have shoes.
For now, they’re effectively undocumented, and Trump’s ICE is on the hunt. So they hide.
III. Invisible in El Paso
“El Cubano” spends his time at home. He paces. He listens to music, studies English, walks a couple of blocks so he doesn’t rust, scrolls Facebook. He doesn’t work because he can’t. His 60-year-old father leaves every morning while he sleeps. He often feels like a parasite.
Now 26 years old, he crossed the Mexico-U.S. border with his parents in October 2024. But he was separated from them and locked in a tiny cell, nicknamed la hielera because Border Patrol keeps the air so cold it feels like an icebox. El Cubano—the rather literal moniker given him by his traveling companions—lost track of time, moving around in his thin shirt to attempt to keep warm.
On the fourth day, he suffered a panic attack: difficulty breathing, tachycardia, fainting. He was wheeled out to an ambulance and injected with something that left him dazed. He was hospitalized, then released the next day without any documents. Officially, El Cubano didn’t seem to exist here.
He took a taxi and met up with his parents, who’d already been released. He visited government offices and attorneys, but without papers, no one offered assistance. He finally found a help center that assisted him with obtaining his immigration file—based on an A-Number, the code that identifies him in the U.S. immigration system. When the file arrived, he discovered he already had a deportation order.
That removal order had been issued in his absence without his knowledge.
Otaigbe explained the predicament. “A regular deportation order is one someone receives after being ordered to leave by a judge,” she said. Those can be issued “in absentia” if an immigrant misses court, but El Cubano’s situation is different: He was processed under what’s called “expedited removal, which can happen at the border or in other instances, without an opportunity to appear in court.”
Because of the order, one attorney told him his case was too complex to take. Another explained his best option was to apply for asylum, the status often sought by refugees from the rest of Latin America. That’s the route he decided on, and he eventually found a lawyer to take the case. The Observer requested an interview with his attorney, but he declined via email.
El Cubano used to dream of being a trucker. He likes the road at night and the feeling of being alone. Plus, truckers make good money. He once hoped to start his own trucking firm in Texas. Now that sounds ridiculous. He can’t even get a dishwashing job. He wakes up late—because why get up early? He doesn’t drive. He doesn’t contribute. Some days, he doesn’t get up at all. His parents take care of him as if he were still a child. Nobody hires him. He feels like an observer of his own life. When he does go out, he sees the world moving and feels paralyzed.
At first, he worried constantly about being deported. Now, nothing seems to matter. “What kind of life is this?” he asks. “I’m unemployed and all the time locked up in the house.” He sometimes feels his life has no purpose.
IV. The Soprano in Houston
Ayala, 26, is petite and slim, with tattoos, facial piercings, and a powerful voice. She was only 12 when a music teacher in her hometown in eastern Cuba first noticed that she kept hitting higher and higher notes without stopping—a feat usually attainable only by a trained lyric soprano.
Her parents enrolled her in voice, piano, and violin lessons. Soon she performed in theaters, plazas, and galas and appeared on television. At 14, she took on “Damisela Encantadora,” the classic waltz that Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona created for the actress and operatic soprano Esther Borja, which demands elegance, long phrasing, and rhythm that few vocal artists can achieve. At 18, she entered the Higher Institute of Art in Holguín, her province, where only a handful of others could compete with her range. But she never graduated.
Her father had already left for the United States, where he was briefly detained and then released with a federal form called an I-220A—to await an immigration hearing without legal status or a work permit. Like others released this way, he had to check in with ICE regularly. (Under Trump’s second administration, formerly routine check-ins have become increasingly dangerous: Starting in March 2025, ICE began detaining Cubans with I-220As at appointments, even some who had been compliant for years.)
Her father was unable to sponsor Ayala himself, so her aunt, a U.S. citizen living in Houston, petitioned for her to come under humanitarian parole in 2022.
She arrived in Texas that year. Her first job was at a Subway, stacking ham and cheese on bread. Later, she joined a golf ball factory, then worked at a pharmaceutical company as a pill-packer before returning to the golf ball factory. She wants to sing and knows of opportunities in the city: auditions and festivals. But her time is consumed by survival. The only thing she’s managed to do is join an amateur choir, with whom she practices on weekends.
Still, her biggest problem isn’t that she can’t perform onstage or that she spends nights packing golf balls. It’s that her father was swept up in Trump’s immigration dragnet.
People admitted with I-220As cannot typically apply for permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, as López told the Observer. Their options are generally limited to applying for asylum or pursuing family petitions if they are related to a citizen or permanent resident.
Ayala’s father lived and worked in Houston without incident until ICE detained him in November 2025.
She could barely communicate with her dad during his time in immigrant detention. They spoke only briefly by phone, long enough for her to know he was alive. She lacked money for a lawyer. Then, in December, he called from Cuba, and that’s how she learned they’d sent him back. It was as if both their lives had begun again.
Back on the island, he’s looking for work and trying to adapt, though poverty has worsened. He hasn’t been able to do much for himself. He hasn’t wanted to talk. He’s depressed.
But Ayala still wants to stay. She works from 3 p.m. until midnight, feeling like a machine, and she prays that her fate won’t get tangled up like her father’s did.
On weekends, she attends choir practice. She keeps her voice warm. Just in case. She feels small in the United States, yet she also feels energized and wonders: What else could I do?
V. Ten Years Is a Lifetime
As of 2020, Fernández had been reporting regularly to the immigration office at 126 North Point Drive in north Houston for three-and-a-half years. The routine was simple: Type his name and A-Number into a machine, sign a form, obtain his next appointment date, and leave.
Fernández, now 29, arrived in Houston in 2011 as an adolescent through a family petition, and he quickly obtained his green card. But days after he turned 19, police found about 2 ounces of marijuana in his possession during a traffic stop. He completed probation, records show, and his misdemeanor charge was dismissed in 2018.
But two parallel court systems exist in the United States: criminal and immigration. And Fernández didn’t know that even with a green card an arrest can trigger deportation. Without knowing the risks, Fernández traveled to Cuba in 2019 to visit family. When he returned on January 4, 2020, immigration officers stopped him at the airport. That unauthorized trip became the trigger for a removal case.
Under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996, immigrants arrested for crimes of so-called moral turpitude—including misdemeanor drug possession—can be subject to deportation. But, historically, ICE has exercised prosecutorial discretion, often not prioritizing removal of people with older offenses—or whose charges were dismissed—and who were otherwise compliant.
Trump began his first term as president by vowing to increase deportations beyond levels achieved by President Barack Obama. He ended attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, but Cuba rarely accepted deportees during Trump’s first administration, so officials essentially converted Fernández’s legal residency into a deferred deportation order. In mid-2020, he was released from detention on the condition that he report regularly. He obtained a driver’s license and a work permit. He worked selling cameras and doing photo shoots on weekends, dreaming of opening his own studio.
Trump was 10 months into his second term as president when Fernández arrived for another check-in on October 3, 2025. The office seemed eerily empty to him. He typed his information into the machine as usual. Instead of receiving his next appointment, he recalls an officer telling him: “You’re going to be detained. We’re going to deport you.”
Within 30 minutes, ICE agents had handcuffed him and taken him to the Joe Corley Processing Center in Conroe—the same facility where he’d been held in 2020. After 27 days, Cuba again refused to accept him. This time, there would be no release home—ICE offered Mexico instead. Fernández signed the papers. They shackled him and put him on a prison bus. After a three-day journey through Texas and Mexico, authorities dropped him in Chiapas, near the Guatemala border, with only the clothes he was wearing.
ICE data reveals that Fernández’s removal reflects a broader trend: The pool of immigrants targeted for deportation has widened dramatically to include more people without any criminal convictions at all.
According to The Marshall Project, people with no criminal convictions accounted for two-thirds of the more than 120,000 deportations carried out between January and May 2025. Syracuse University researcher Austin Kocher, who analyzes ICE statistics through the Deportation Data Project, confirmed this trend: 92 percent of the growth in ICE detention over a period from September 21 to January was driven by immigrants with no criminal convictions.
Now in exile, Fernández has been writing to photography studios, trying to rebuild. His parents care for his dog in Houston, and his friends at the camera store sometimes send funds to help him. His girlfriend remains behind; they’re attempting a long-distance relationship.
Technically, Fernández, like some other long-term former permanent residents who were deported, can apply for a waiver to return in 10 years. But to him, 10 years is a lifetime.
“If I’m going to spend 10 years here, building my life, why would I want to go there and start all over again from zero?”
Editor’s Note: Portions of the stories reported here were presented at the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad’s annual Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism in 2025.
The post ‘What Kind of Life Is This?’: Five Desperate Cubans Weigh Their Odds in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.
