“I am super happy. It was a saga to get out of Cuba,” Ronald Rodriguez Torres told the Miami Herald. He’d been detained for months when he was suddenly freed, one of the more than 6,000 asylum-seekers to be affected by the November data leak that exposed everything from names to birth dates to where they were being detained. There’s really no reason to detain asylum-seekers in the first place. Officials had actually released Rodriguez Torres’ wife, Mailien Gonzalez, after processing them in October. But they kept Rodriguez Torres detained, only releasing him because of the leaks.
“Thanks to my family who did everything possible and impossible to get me out of here,” he continued in the report.
“Several formerly detained Cuban migrants, as well as relatives of the detained, told the Herald that there were as many as 26 at Broward Transitional Center who had been affected by the government’s unprecedented data dump and who had been released or were in the process of being released,” the report continued. “Many received year-long paroles, while others were put under supervision orders to check in with authorities, they added.” More than a decade of government data examined by the American Immigration Council shows that the vast majority of migrants show up for their immigration hearings, contrary to GOP fearmongering.
As previously noted, U.S. officials had apparently been unaware of the leak until notified by the Human Rights First advocacy group, The Los Angeles Times reported last month. The data was apparently up for hours on the ICE website and was supposedly put there by accident during a website update. But then came the news that a DHS official had told Cuba that some asylum-seekers who were set to be deported were victims of the leak.
Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba, tweeted that the U.S. “effectively doxxed them and then confirmed the doxxing to the state asylees left.” Terrifying.
Ultimately more than 6,000 asylum-seekers were affected by the leak, all of them still in detention at that time. While some Cubans “effectively doxxed” by the U.S. seem to be safe for now, there’s no telling if that’ll be the same case for the many others affected by mistake that was none of their own doing. Considering that Republicans have successfully gone to right-wing courts to continue a deeply flawed order that shows little mercy to migrants asking for refuge at our borders, the least the federal government can to do rectify this fuckup is to help those currently inside our borders and let them fight their cases in freedom.
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