A Cuban woman living in Tampa, Florida, who came to the United States in 2019 and is married to a U.S. citizen was abruptly detained by immigration authorities and deported to Cuba on Thursday, leaving behind her 1-year-old child.

Heidy Sánchez, 44, a Hillsborough County resident, was among 82 Cuban migrants sent on a plane from Miami back to Cuba on Thursday morning, her husband, Carlos Yuniel Valle, told the Miami Herald. Her deportation has been so sudden and traumatic for their infant daughter, still breastfeeding and with ongoing health issues, that her grandmother was taking her to the hospital, he said in a phone interview on Friday.

“The baby is distressed and does not want to eat,” Valle said. “Imagine, they ripped the child from her mother’s arms at the immigration office; the cries of that woman in there could be heard back in Cuba,” he said, speaking of his wife’s desperation at being separated from her daughter.

Sánchez was still wearing clothing from the detention center when her husband saw her on a video call on Thursday from where she is staying in Havana. Her abrupt return to the island is coming at a time Cubans are dealing with severe shortages of food and necessities and electrical blackouts that may extend for several days. And she doesn’t have a home there.

“I am here at the store trying to buy things so that I can send her a package with toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, sanitary pads and clothes,” her husband said.

Their family separation nightmare started Tuesday when Sánchez was detained at her check-in appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Tampa office. With tears in his eyes and holding their daughter, Valle pleaded for help to stop the deportation of his wife in a video he published on Facebook the following day. Last-minute efforts by Sánchez’s lawyer and Tampa U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor to prevent her imminent deportation were unsuccessful, he said.

“They did everything possible to remove her,” her lawyer, Miami-based attorney Claudia Cañizares, said, including not disclosing where her client was being held. She said ICE agents knew Sánchez had a 1-year-old daughter because the baby had come to the appointment with her.

Cañizares said that in the less than 72 hours between Sánchez’s detention and her deportation to the island she and her staff started a frantic efforts to try to contact her and apply for a stay of removal, an order that would have temporarily prevented the Department of Homeland Security from deporting Sánchez on humanitarian grounds.

They suspected she had been transferred to Miami but could not find her at ICE detention facilities in Broward or Miami. In a last push to try to stop her removal, Cañizares went to Miami International Airport on Thursday morning because Sánchez had appeared in a locator system for detained migrants as being under U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody. Officials at the airport told her she was not there. When she tried to reach a supervisor at a center that helps coordinate deportations between DHS agencies, she said a female officer who picked up her call refused and hung up the phone.

Cañizares said one of her firm’s lawyers tried to enter the stay of removal order on behalf of Sánchez around 9 a.m. at an ICE office in Miramar, but officials there prevented her from doing so, arguing that Sánchez had already been deported. After the lawyer’s insistence, they accepted the application around 10:50 a.m.

But Cañizares said she believes her client had already been put on a plane around 10 a.m.

An ICE spokesperson said he was going to start requesting information about the case but could not immediately respond to a request for comment. A member of Castor’s staff said her office could not provide details of the case out of privacy concerns but said the congresswoman has been assisting the family and would continue to do so.

New reality for Cuban migrants

Like many Cubans living in the U.S. with an immigration document known as I-220B, Sánchez had a deportation order but had been allowed to live in the country because the Cuban government has, in recent years, taken back only a minimal number of deportees. A Herald search of Florida’s criminal history central depository found that Sanchez has no criminal record, so her case did not fall into deportation priorities set by the Biden administration.

That all changed quickly since January.

Her removal comes as the Trump administration is making an aggressive push to send millions of migrants, even those entering the U.S. legally, back to their home countries or third nations with questionable human rights records like El Salvador or, in this case, Cuba. Deportation flights to the communist-ruled island were restored under President Joe Biden in 2023 amid historic numbers of Cubans fleeing poverty and political repression.

Since then, Cuban officials have said that the Cuban government has accepted a monthly flight. A brief note published in Cuban state media said Thursday’s deportation flight was the fourth since the beginning of the year. Eight women, including Sánchez, and 74 men were on Thursday’s flight, the note said.

Sánchez’s case also illustrates the ordeal of Cuban migrants who, in recent years, have watched how policies that once benefited those fleeing communism have been stripped piece by piece by both Democratic and Republican presidents.

Sánchez arrived in the U.S. in 2019, two years after former President Barack Obama had eliminated an automatic parole policy for Cubans known as “wet-foot dry-foot.” By 2019, the first Trump administration had implemented a new policy known as Remain in Mexico, by which migrants had to stay in Mexico until they could plead their asylum case before a U.S. immigration judge.

But because of the chaos and violence on the Mexican side of the border, where thousands of migrants were crowding small border towns, many controlled by drug cartels, she missed her second hearing, her husband said. She didn’t know a judge had issued an order for her removal for failing to appear at the hearing, and when she appeared again to ask for admission at a legal border crossing, U.S. immigration officials detained her, her attorney said.

She was detained for nine months, but because it was not easy to send migrants back to Cuba, ICE ultimately released her with a document known as an I-220B, which requires periodic check-ins with ICE officials. Since she married Valle, a U.S. citizen, in 2021, the family did not think their American dream was in peril.

Valle, who came to the U.S. in 2006 from San José, a town near Havana, and owns a small landscaping company, said his wife studied to obtain a license to work as a home health aide. With their savings, they paid for expensive and extremely difficult in vitro fertilization process to have their daughter, he said.

They recently became homeowners, according to Valle’s Facebook feed, in which he frequently posts pictures of family outings and gatherings with relatives to celebrate American holidays with a pork roast.

Cañizares, the attorney, said she will continue fighting for Sánchez’s return to the U.S. and hopes a humanitarian parole to reunite her with her family might be successful. The attorney said the child had been born prematurely and had lately developed seizures.

Still, Valle fears it could be years before his family is reunited. He said he just wants his wife to have the opportunity to continue the process to legalize her status. In the meantime, they still might face another looming threat: plans under discussion by administration officials and members of Congress to ban all travel to and from the island with no exceptions, which could make their reunion even more difficult.

“It’s a very sad thing,” he said, recounting how Sanchez broke into tears when she saw her daughter in the video call on Thursday morning. “Separating a mother from a child who’s only one year old when she is in the middle of a legal process? Where are human rights in this country?”

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