Green card approvals for Cubans have nearly stopped under President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, while ICE arrests of people from the island have surged, according to a new Cato Institute analysis.
Since December 2024, green card approvals for Cubans have fallen 99.8%, while ICE arrests of Cubans have risen 463%, the libertarian think tank found. In October 2024, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved more than 10,000 Cuban applicants for lawful permanent residence. By January 2026, only 15 Cubans became permanent residents, according to the study reported by the Miami Herald.
The sharp reversal has hit one of the immigrant groups long treated differently under U.S. law. For decades, the Cuban Adjustment Act has allowed many Cubans to apply for permanent residency after living in the United States for one year and one day. That fast-track status made Cubans an exception in the U.S. immigration system, especially in South Florida, home to the country's largest Cuban American community.
The Cato Institute says that exception has been effectively frozen.
"The Trump administration has drastically reduced legal immigration from abroad, but it has simultaneously slashed grants of legal permanent residence to people already in the United States," David J. Bier, Cato's director of immigration studies, wrote in the report. He said the Department of Homeland Security suspended many green card applications, allowing ICE to arrest immigrants who otherwise could have obtained more secure legal status.
The report says the administration "nearly ended green card approvals for Cubans" while ICE arrests of Cubans climbed from fewer than 200 per month in late 2024 to more than 1,000 per month by late 2025. "This is a dramatic curtailing of immigration from Cuba," Bier told the Miami Herald.
The shift is tied to several Trump administration policies. In February 2025, USCIS suspended immigration benefit requests for many people who entered under the Biden-era parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. The administration later ended the parole program and canceled underlying parole status for many migrants, creating new exposure to arrest and deportation. In December 2025, USCIS also suspended adjustments of status and other immigration benefit requests for Cubans and applicants from other countries, according to Cato.
The result, immigration advocates say, is legal limbo. Many Cubans entered the United States legally, applied for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, and then saw their cases stall as enforcement expanded.
The policy shift is politically sensitive in Miami-Dade, where Cuban Americans remain a powerful Republican constituency but do not uniformly support deportations to the island. A recent Miami Herald poll found that 68% of Cubans and Cuban Americans in South Florida strongly or somewhat disapprove of increasing deportations of undocumented Cubans without criminal records. The same survey found broad support for allowing Cubans to migrate legally to the United States.
Cato argues the Cuban numbers are part of a broader enforcement strategy that depends on slowing or blocking legal status. The report found that USCIS cut overall green card approvals by about half, with the deepest reductions affecting humanitarian categories, including Cubans, refugees, asylees, and crime victims.
The shift also complicates Republican politics in Miami. Trump remains popular among many Cuban American and Venezuelan American voters, but deportations are politically sensitive because of both countries' authoritarian governments (even in Venezuela after Maduro's ouster) and the risk faced by dissidents, activists, and people who fled political or economic collapse.
Cuban American representatives María Elvira Salazar, Mario Díaz-Balart, and Carlos Gimenez are finding strong democratic opponents for the November midterm elections. Immigration and inflation are the two main topics among voters.
© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
