The morning Pedro Lorenzo Concepción arrived in Cancún turned out to be a hot morning, hotter than any he'd experienced in Miami, even hotter than any he remembered from his years in Cuba. He disembarked a bus at the ADO terminal, but unlike the rest of the passengers he was not an enthusiastic vacationer in the tropics. Pedro was here to stay. He had been deported from the United States to Mexico and was completely disoriented. Using the phone he'd bought at a gas station, he called his wife in Florida. His voice cracked.
-- And what am I going to do here now?
He was wearing black pants, a black sweater, an Adidas cap, and sneakers whose laces had been removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Once in Mexico, his belongings were returned to him, and so on September 14, he was wearing exactly the same clothes he had worn when he showed up at the ICE offices in Miramar, Florida, on July 8. He only emerged to become one of the first inmates at the newly opened Alligator Alcatraz detention center, a migrant's nightmare.
Not knowing which way to go in Cancún, Pedro set out walking for a few blocks. He walked without realizing where he was going, looking without registering what he saw. He was -- or at least that's how he felt -- the most lost person in the entire world. Suddenly, a man approached, almost an apparition. "I looked at him and said, 'Gustavo, what are you doing here?' And he said, 'Damn, Pedri, what are you doing here?'"
They had known each other since 2012, ever since the tough times at the Everglades Correctional Institution, where Pedro, 44, served a three-year sentence after being convicted of guarding a house with marijuana crops. Now they were together: Gustavo had been deported a week earlier, and Pedro had just arrived at the place where almost all Cubans whom the Havana government has rejected on deportation flights from the United States end up.
At the end of his presidency, during the distant days of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, Barack Obama negotiated with Raúl Castro the possibility of admitting flights with deportees. Since then, Cuba has claimed the right to decide who it takes back. The pattern of deportees the Cuban government accepts is unknown, but the majority have been migrants from recent exoduses. Almost a week ago, the Ministry of the Interior reported the last flight to Havana, the ninth from the United States, with 136 migrants on board, bringing the total number of deportees to nearly 1,000 by the end of last September.
For Pedro, it is a relief to be in Mexico and not Cuba. "Cuba, never," he says. He even feels fortunate not to have been sent to Africa, where some Cubans have ended up. President Claudia Sheinbaum ruled out a few months ago that Mexico would become a third country to which migrants of other nationalities would be deported, but dozens of Cubans have ended up there since the Trump administration began its expulsion campaign, although there is no official figure.
In addition to his friend Gustavo, Pedro also ran into Ernesto, whom he met at the Alligator Alcatraz prison. Ernesto reached out to him several times, when he was exhausted and battered from the hunger strike he began in late July. He stopped eating, Pedro says, for himself, for all the Cubans detained there, and because he felt his life no longer belonged to him, but rather that ICE was disposing of it at will. More than once, Ernesto helped him get out of bed or handed him his phone so he could contact his family.
Now they're back in the same place, but farther from home. Ernesto is living with some friends who took him in, and Gustavo in a space he pays for with the little money he has. They say a woman they call "La Madrina" offers food and cheap rooms to the deportees, the new people populating Cancún. They sleep cramped together, in spaces where up to eight people stay, the starting point for starting a life from scratch again, to once again be migrants in a place they hadn't planned for.
While they remained detained in Florida, they had the relief of still being in the United States. "You always hope something happens and they'll release them, even if it's with an ankle monitor," says Daimarys Hernández, Pedro's wife, almost in tears, a 40-year-old manicurist who has lost many clients in recent weeks and suspects the reason is that ICE took her husband.
After nearly 20 years as a couple, confirmation that Pedro would not be returning with her and their three children to the home they had worked so hard to buy came in early September, when officials approached the man's cell at Krome to tell him he was being deported. Pedro had been transferred to that detention center in Miami after authorities sought to shift the focus from his ongoing hunger strike at Alligator Alcatraz, a site plagued by allegations of mistreatment, overcrowding, and almost inhumane living conditions. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserted at the time that there was "no hunger strike at Alligator Alcatraz."
Pedro abandoned his strike at Krome after officials promised him he wouldn't be on a deportation list. Due to the days of abstinence, his health suffered, and he had to undergo hemorrhoid surgery. On September 7, a guard informed him that he was finally going to be deported to Mexico. "I told him I wasn't going to sign any deportation papers, but he said, 'No, you don't have to sign them. We're here to inform you that we're going to take you to Mexico.'"
Without any explanation as to where they were being taken, the bus departed with five migrants from the Krome center to Opa-locka Airport in Miami. Pedro and the rest boarded an early morning flight to Jacksonville, in northern Florida. There, officers boarded another group and they continued their journey. All were dressed in orange uniforms and handcuffed.
Pedro's memories fade, but he doesn't forget the woman who was on the plane with her son. After hours of flying, they landed in Texas, were escorted to another plane, and departed for a prison in San Diego, California. The realization that he was leaving the United States, the country he arrived in as a rafter in 2006, became even more acute. "The only thing I thought about was not being with my wife and children," he says.
The next day, they were transported by bus to the Tijuana border. They were a group of 31 Cubans, including five women. The armed ICE officers warned them that if they didn't get off, they would be beaten. Once off the bus, they were handed over to Mexican immigration authorities, who, according to Pedro, treated them in a way ICE never had and welcomed them to their country. "Somehow, I felt calmer," he says.
It was there that he met Alberto, a federal immigration agent at the Otay International Port of Entry, who asked to change his name for protection. As he explains, this is how the border process works: "ICE gives us a document with their names, nationality, and any medical conditions. We remove their handcuffs, we feed them, we are humane," he says. "I told them: 'You are not prisoners here, you are free here, this is just a protocol.'" Alberto and other officers departed with 51 migrants on buses to the immigration station in Mexico City.
Along the way, Alberto worried about whether they were getting dizzy or had headaches. He allowed Pedro to get off the bus several times to relieve the pain caused by sitting for hours due to his surgery. Alberto looked at them and, he says, felt "very helpless." "I have mixed feelings; they made a life there and ended up deported," he maintains. "At the end of the day, we're all human."
From the Mexican capital, they departed for Tabasco, in the southeast of the country, the final destination for deportees. Authorities informed them they had 30 days to request asylum and warned them they could only remain in southern Mexico, in case they were thinking of attempting to cross the border back into the United States. Pedro listened to the instructions, left the station, called his wife, Daimarys, who was in tears, asked where he could get a taxi, paid $20 to be taken to the ADO bus terminal, booked a ticket for 6 p.m., and arrived in Cancún the next day.
The Parador Hotel was where he spent his first nights in Cancún. A hotel maid offered to do his laundry and pick up the money his wife was going to send him. Pedro was bewildered; he rarely left his room, doing so only to dine at a Chinese restaurant across the street. Then he would return to his room and try to sleep. The hardest part of being free, he says, has been getting to sleep. "Sometimes I wake up agitated and reach out to my side to look for my wife."
Three days later, Pedro had secured his own apartment, a modest space with a terrace, a small kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. He paid 7,000 Mexican pesos, almost $400, for which Daimarys is paying for now with help from family and friends. Until he finds a job, his wife will be responsible for him. "It's like maintaining two homes," she says. "I'm finding it very difficult, and I have to help him keep a roof over his head, eat, until he can get his papers." The couple even considered selling the house in Florida, but agreed not to do so for their children.
A friend of Pedro's offered to visit him and bring some of his belongings from Miami. Daimarys, who had her passport made to go see him, can't remember a sadder moment than when she had to start taking his clothes out of the closet. It was proof that her husband no longer lived in the house. "All his things were there, along with mine; this was still his place, but once I had to put them in the suitcase, it was very hard." She packed his clothes, some towels, and toiletries, but Pedro asked for one thing in particular: that she not forget to send him the shirt he wore for his oldest son's fourth birthday, which no longer fits him, but which he wants to keep wherever he is.
They spend their time on the phone. They're not lying when they say they talk more than 15 times a day. Pedro is always checking the house, checking if everything is in order, if their four French Bulldogs have eaten, or if the children have come home from school. The children still think their father will walk through the door at any moment. "They still haven't understood that it's permanent," says their mother. Recently, one of the three said to her: "Mommy, but if they've already released him, why doesn't Daddy come home?" She repeated that his father can't return. The son floated an idea: "But he should come and not leave the house."
Pedro lives in the shadows under the blazing Cancún sun. "I'm like a ghost," he insists. "I still haven't accepted the reality I'm living in. It was 20 years in the United States. Now I have to start from scratch; I don't know how I'm going to pay rent next month. I didn't want to be separated from my family." His wife believes that, when the children grow up, she will move to Mexico. "My retirement will be in Cancún," she says. They recently celebrated 19 years together, and they have promised, on their reunion day, to open a bottle of tequila and get drunk until dawn in Quintana Roo.