U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) on Wednesday announced the arrest of a former intelligence member of Cuba’s communist Castro regime who fraudulently obtained a U.S. green card.
While ICE has not publicly disclosed the identity of the former Cuban intelligence officer at press time, HSI’s Miami division published a photo of the arrest Wednesday afternoon through social media, stating the arrest was carried out in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The arrested man, whose face is not seen in the picture but appears to sport gray hair, stands accused of having fraudulently obtained Lawful Permanent Residence Status in the United States. Miami-based Homeland Security Investigations spokesman Nestor Yglesias reportedly explained that the arrest took place in West Park, Broward County.
“I have confirmation that the FBI Miami just arrested an agent of the Castro dictatorship who had infiltrated our community by lying on his immigration application,” Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) said through social media on Wednesday. “Biden allowed our country to be filled with these repressors, and we are now working together with the Trump Administration to remove these agents of the regime from our nation.”
Several members of the Cuban diaspora living in the U.S. denounced over the past year that dozens of members of the Castro regime availed themselves of immigration policies implemented during the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden to enter and live in the United States, such as the Biden administration’s “Humanitarian Parole” program and open border politics.
Some of the known cases include Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, a Cuban pilot linked to the death of four American citizens in 1996 who entered the United States through the “parole” program in April 2024. Similarly, Manuel Menéndez Castellanos, a former member of the Cuban Communist Party and former henchman of late murderous communist dictator Fidel Castro entered the United States in August through a program known as the “Cuban Family Reunification Parole” and is believed to reside in Florida.
In August, the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC), a nongovernmental organization, denounced that the number of Castro regime representatives entering the United States had “increased fivefold” since 2023. FHRC maintains a publicly accessible verified list of roughly 1,000 known Castro regime repressors. The organization warned at the time that 115 known Cuban repressors — more than ten percent of the organization’s verified list — had entered the United States since February 2023.
In that same month, the Patmos Institute, a Cuban pro-human rights and religious freedom NGO expressed its concerns over “the alarming trend of the entry into the United States of those responsible for the communist system in Cuba.”
Mario Félix Lleonart, the organization’s director, expressed at the time that the group felt alarmed because it was “not two, not three, not four cases,” but instead it was “constantly seeing” how officials, “even high-ranking” Castro regime officials had entered the United States.
Two nieces of Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz reportedly reside in Florida after one crossed the U.S. southern border in 2022 and the other was accepted as a beneficiary of the Biden Administration’s “humanitarian parole” program in 2023.
Marrero Cruz’s son, Manuel Alejandro Marrero Medina, had been reportedly accepted as a beneficiary of the “parole” program, but the required flight permit was ultimately denied, which prevented him from boarding a plane to the United States.
In December 2023, American prosecutors charged 74-year old Victor Manuel Rocha, a longtime U.S. diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, with spying extensively for Cuba’s communist regime for over 40 years.
Rocha, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Colombia that resided in Miami at the time of his arrest, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on April 2024 after he pleaded guilty.
“I repeat, if you know any repressor of the murderous dictatorship in Cuba, who is now living in the United States, please report him here,” Gimenez said Wednesday evening, sharing a link to FHRC’s list of known Cuban repressors. “Agents of the regime have no place in our community of victims of these scoundrels.”
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