In the era of the first convict of the United States, Yelenis Pérez has remembered the crime for which he was sentenced 28 years ago. The Cuban immigrant thought that he had already paid his debt to justice for a while, but before immigration agents andelenis he is, forever, a criminal. Therefore, Donald Trump’s government has given him until October to leave the United States, as deported, back to the country he left three decades ago. “I thought that after so long nothing was going to happen to me,” he says.
Yelenis had a deportation order since 2013, as many other immigrants who have still remained in the country have been in the country, since, for years, the US government has prioritized to expel foreigners who consider a threat to national security. That practice, however, came to an end with Trump’s return to power. The Republican, obsessed with deporting one million people in his first year of mandate, says he is taking out from the country to “the worst of the worst”, although the figures show that a significant percentage of those deported in the last six months had no criminal record.
Some of those who did, like Yelenis, served their sentences years ago. They have remade their lives since then. They have children, grandchildren, jobs and have little left in the countries that emigrated in search of opportunities, stability. After believing that they had already solved all their problems before justice, they have been criminalized again and put on the deportable list.
The order given to stop 3,000 daily migrants, but it is known that the customs immigration and control service (ICE) has filled the cells of its detention centers with people without sentences, and very few with serious crimes. Although the National Security Department states that 70% of the arrests of the ICE so far this year have been of people with criminal records, figures obtained by the data on deportations of the Law Faculty of the University of California-Berkeley, show that in reality 45% of those arrested had pending sentences or charges. The numbers reveal that 58% of the detainees had received in the past an order of deportation by a judge, but, like Yelenis, they continued in the country for not being a threat to society.
Yelenis already bought a ticket for almost 600 dollars that will leave Tampa International Airport, Florida, on October 25, and will land hours later in the city of Holguin. He did it after last July 14, during a routine appointment with immigration, the officer looked into his eyes through the glass of the box and told him to return in October. The immigrant replied that yes, that in October 2026 he was going back, as he has always done, year after year, to the appointments that correspond to him. But the officer stared at her and told him that he was not understanding: that in 90 days the woman should present you with a ready passport and a passage to Cuba.
“The world fell, I didn’t know whether to cry, if laughing, if I was listening well,” recalls the 55 -year -old Cuban. Yelenis babbled a couple more questions to the officer: if he had to introduce himself with his suitcase ready because that same October 14 he had to leave, it will not be that he did not give him time to collect his Kilitosthe money he had saved after his 27 -year -old work as a supervisor assistant at the University of Tampa. The officer told him no, that from that moment they would give him two weeks to leave the United States. “I left there that I didn’t see, I endured from the wall, I thought I was going to fall,” he says on the phone.
Outside Tampa immigration offices was waiting for her family. They saw that Yelenis approached crying and thought it was of happiness, that they returned to the usual routine: she rising at seven in the morning, returning from work about six in the afternoon, taking care of the grandchildren if their son and daughter -daughter had to leave, sending the Damage Monthly to his parents in Cuba. They pounced to hug her.
“I started shouting, I told them that I had to go,” says Yelenis. “From there to here I changed my life.
The crime of yelenis
It was a long time ago. His daughter Diana, 28, was three months old when the FBI arrested the parents on the road. They had gone to collect letters and photos that the family had sent them from Cuba, where they left as balsos in 1994. But the officers made them return home. They had set up a police operation: “It seemed that we had killed someone. I do not do anything illegal in this world, the people who know me cannot believe that they can deport me for something they know that I did not do.”
The officers found in the laundry of the house the drug that, according to Yelenis, had the brother of her husband, who lived with them. She didn’t know that was there, but they took them all detained. Then they went on bail. She spent a year of probative to check if she consumed drugs, but one day the person who did the exams said: “It would be disrespectful if I continue to test, I already know that you do not even do drugs.”
For Yelenis an endless journey between courts, lawyers and laws that raffled as could. “I didn’t know what was happening to me,” he recalls. Although he always denied that he had something to do with the sale of cocaine, he says that the judge told him to declare himself guilty, that it was the way to fix his situation. “There they sank me,” he says. Since then it carries a crime of traffic and sale of drugs.
A first lawyer, who would later end in jail, scam him a lot of money promising to clean his history and direct it until obtaining his permanent residence. It was never possible. The case was sealed and then she tried to find solutions with other lawyers or criminalists, but they all concluded the same thing: “They told me that nothing could be done because the case had a stamp.”
Yelenis never lost his work at the University of Tampa, where he is one of the oldest employees. He had another son, he divorced, married again. Twelve years after the incident, he wanted to get rid of the past he dragged. He hired another lawyer who recommended accepting deportation as the only way to resolve the case and be able to have his work permit in order. “I said: ‘Well, if I have my work permit, I have to accept a deportation, then give it to me,” he says. “It was a mistake that I made.” He has never been able to clean his history.
The crime for which she was blamed marked the family. His daughter Diana grew up translating each of Yelenis’s migratory documents. “Before learning to read at school, I learned to read migration documents,” says the young woman. “That was always a trauma. I felt that I had to become independent, in case one day they took it, to work in life.”
That day had not arrived, until now. Every year, Yellenis has been reported to the immigration offices, where they sign a role, return it and then return home. Although he has hired a lawyer who assures him that he has “a strong case”, and that he can defend it, the family fears that the mother will rise to that flight to Cuba on October 25. “Now nothing is the same,” says his other son, José Antonio. “We are with that in the mind, the fear that it can be the last time we see it here in the United States.”
The eternal price of the immigrant
The immigration lawyer, Jonathan Shaw, is clear that there is a United States for citizens and another for immigrants. “The criminal process in this country is a different world for an immigrant,” he says. If an American commits some type of crime, he has the possibility to clean his criminal history. But, according to the expert, “the record will always appear for immigration officers; it is something that people always carry, such as a tattoo. For the immigrant who is accused of a crime, no matter how much he pays the price, everything will be different.”
Perhaps the best example of this is the fact that Trump himself was convicted in New York of 34 serious crimes for falsifying commercial records in May 2024. Months later he was reelected president.
Due to that reality, Rafael Collado is today in the feared prison of Aligator Alcatraz, the largest symbol of the migratory crusade in Florida. The system does not forgive him, no matter how long time has passed and lived almost two decades after bars. Sonia Bicara, her partner, says that her love with Rafael has been a love in detention. It was in her youth, and it is now, that she is 64 years old, he 63, and were calm, finally enjoying time together after so much separate. “They were 17 years very sad,” she says. That was the conviction that Rafael complied with the crime of aggravated assault in 2000.
They had been together for a short time, they did not arrive at the year of courtship. Rafael likes to dance, so they went to a nightclub of the Miamense night. A man touched his butt to Sonia and Rafael got in. After a fight, the couple followed a while in the clubbut about three in the morning, when they decided to leave, the man waited for them outside and fell to the car. They managed to get unharmed. A month later they met again, but this time it was Rafael who shot. Although there were no victims in the incident, he turned 17 in prison, first in Florida, then in Georgia.
Sonia moved there with her four daughters, whom Rafael wanted so much. In 17 years in prison there was everything: good times, to send cards and visit it twice a week, and worse times, in which they were even distanced. “The relationship was hard, because when you have someone imprisoned, it is as if you were also imprisoned.”
Rafael left prison in 2017 “For good conduct.” It was not easy to return to live together, it seemed that they had met again for the first time. “When he left I got nervous. He too. But we were working, we wanted ourselves. It was hard, because being all that time locked up, he got up at night startled nights, slept with crossed hands.” The jail affected his nerves, but Rafael resumed his life outside: every year he paid his work permit and did work as a gardener. Almost three months ago they moved to Miami again, where they got a house for people with low resources.
On July 7, Sonia, as he did every year, accompanied Rafael to his appointment at immigration offices in Miramar. They were nervous. “I told him not, for everything that was happening, but he told me no, that if he was doing well until now, he would continue to do so.”
Rafael entered his appointment. Time passed. Sonia worried, nobody said anything. After a few hours he saw him get handcuffed, they looked into his eyes and he threw a kiss. The next thing was a call from Rafael from the Aligator Alcatraz detention center, where they barely give him his pills for depression and where a few days ago he decided that he was tired of living.
Sonia knew that she cut her veins and took him to a prison medical center. When he was able to communicate with him, he said: “But why do you do that? Remember that I am here. Rafael arrived from Cuba to the United States with 18 years, in one of the boats that came out of the port of El Mariel with thousands of people on board – the “slags” of which Fidel Castro wanted to clean the island. Now the Trump government intends to expel it in the same way. “But he says that for Cuba it does not go, that from here you have to take it dead,” says Sonia.
He also feels as if Rafael “were charging again”: “He fulfilled everything.”
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
