Cuban asylum seekers detained by ICE after court appearance despite valid refugee claims

Zaida Martínez, fifty-seven, sits in her home in San Miguel del Padrón, Havana, knowing her two sons are locked in a detention facility in Arizona. She would rather they stay there than come back to Cuba, where the government might imprison them for what they said and did in the streets. This is the impossible choice she has made, and it haunts her.

Her sons, Liosmel and Liosbel Sánchez, were twenty-five and twenty-eight when Immigration and Customs Enforcement took them into custody on May 20, 2025, as they left an immigration court hearing in Phoenix. They had entered the United States legally in late 2024 through the CBP One program, carrying temporary parole status. They had no criminal record. They had credible asylum claims. They had done everything right. And then, walking out of the courthouse where they had appeared before a judge, they were arrested.

The brothers' story begins on July 11, 2021, when Cuba erupted in its largest anti-government protests in more than fifty years. Liosmel, the younger one, had been part of a movement of young Cubans who used Twitter and memes to mock the regime, demand humanitarian corridors, and collect medicine for provinces in crisis. He was a medical student, described by his mother as more open about his feelings and ideas. His older brother Liosbel was quieter, more reserved, but warm and social—a mid-level computer technician. When the protests began in San Antonio de los Baños and spread across the island, Liosmel called his friend Cristhian González de la Moneda. They had talked about what they would do if the streets erupted. Now they knew. They took a bus to Vedado, walked to the Malecón, and joined thousands of Cubans marching toward the Capitol, singing "Patria y Vida," the dissident rap song that had become the anthem of their generation's defiance.

Liosbel had also taken to the streets in his neighborhood. Their mother did not know until later, when one of their friends was arrested and she began to understand the danger. The July protests left more than fifteen hundred people detained. Sentences stretched to twenty years. The brothers were not imprisoned then, but the shadow of state repression followed them. Liosbel's small plumbing business was robbed repeatedly while authorities inspected it week after week. Liosmel was called in regularly by State Security at his medical school, threatened with expulsion from his program. They were being hunted slowly, methodically. By late 2024, they decided to leave.

They arrived in the United States and lived for several months in Seattle, in a room in Cristhian's house. Cristhian had arrived a year earlier, also fleeing threats for his role in the July protests. He asked his friends to wait patiently for their work permits, to help with the house, to be still. Eventually the brothers moved into their own apartment. They bought a television, new dishes, a dish rack, garbage cans. They were building a life. They were happy.

On the afternoon of May 20, Cristhian noticed the brothers had not messaged him about how their court appearance had gone. Their mother, writing from Cuba, received no reply. When Cristhian entered their names into the ICE locator database, he found them. They had been detained immediately after leaving the courthouse. Their asylum cases had been closed. The world fell away. "I thought it was a mistake, that they would let them go," he said. But the brothers Sánchez were now in the system again, starting over. They had passed a credible fear interview—the first hurdle—and were waiting to defend their asylum petition from inside the Eloy detention facility in Arizona, scheduled for late September.

They are not alone. The Cuban rapper Eliexer Márquez Duany, known as El Funky, who co-wrote "Patria y Vida," had his application for permanent residence rejected under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law that had protected island emigrants for decades. Gregory Antonio Sanabria Tarazona, a Venezuelan opposition activist who spent more than three years imprisoned in El Helicoide, was detained by ICE when he appeared in immigration court in June. Immigration courts have become hunting grounds. According to immigration attorney Willy Allen, the strategy is deliberate: the government must detain three thousand people daily, and it is far easier to arrest those who show up to court and follow the law than to find actual criminals. In forty years of practice, Allen had never had a client detained in a courtroom. Now four of his clients have been taken. The cases are being closed so the government has grounds to hold people without bail. In detention, they must pass a credible fear interview, and only then can they proceed. The process is slower, more vulnerable, more precarious.

The United States has granted more asylum petitions than any other country in recent years, yet the numbers are shifting. By the end of last year, nearly one and a half million applications were pending. But in March 2025, the latest month with available data, seventy-six percent of asylum claims were denied. Liosmel and Liosbel Sánchez, who fled political persecution and entered legally, now wait in a cell in Arizona, caught between two countries, belonging to neither, their mother choosing the lesser of two terrors.