Amidst a string of outrageous and illegal acts inspired by Heritage Foundation‘s Project 2025 manifesto, a Florida mother of an infant with health complications was abruptly deported to Cuba during a routine-immigration meeting. Heidy Sánchez turned up to the meeting with her daughter and was promptly disappeared by ICE, as Nora Gámez Torres wrote for Miami Herald:
‘They did everything possible to remove her,’ Miami-based attorney Claudia Cañizares said, including not disclosing where her client was being held. She said ICE agents knew Sánchez had a one-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.
With Sánchez having no criminal history, the Herald piece continued, her case fell outside Biden Administration‘s previous “deportation priorities.” But that quickly changed after January 2025:
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… 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.
Sánchez’s attorney, Claudia Cañizares, said she would continue to petition U.S. government for her return.
Swift, evidence-free deportations are a cornerstone of Project 2025 agenda—and acting-ICE director Todd Lyons recently said he wants deportation to work like Amazon Prime.
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
The fact that a mother who is *married to an American* must still have regular “check ins” with ICE lays bare how broken our system of immigration really is. But with Donald’s regime (temporarily) in charge, even immigrants who have documentation, and who show up to mandatory ICE meetings, are at risk of getting abducted by the trigger-happy enterprise.
Sánchez was freely living and working under what’s called “I-220B Order of Supervision,” but because of an existing-deportation order against her, she was forced to keep going to her ICE meetings. And it was at one of those meetings to keep her status that she was grotesquely rendered back to Cuba.
