News · Migration
A Cuban doctor on an I-220A has spent over a year in ICE detention in Texas with no ruling
Miguel Ángel Alba Rosario was arrested on November 4, 2025 in Houston when he showed up for a routine immigration check-in; his family is calling for his release, according to a Univision report carried by CiberCuba.
Alba Rosario, a Cuban doctor, has been held at the IAH detention center in Livingston, Texas, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him on November 4, 2025 in Houston, when he showed up for a routine immigration check-in. He had entered the United States in 2022 on an I-220A form.
"It has been horrible. Look, for a year now I have had to be both mother and father, I have three bright kids in school", said his wife Sandra, also a doctor, in remarks carried by Univision and translated by Yamacoa. From the detention center, Alba said: "To this day I have been in prison for more than a year".
An immigration judge rejected his asylum claim, even though he has no criminal record. On October 20, 2026 his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case Alba Rosario v. Sanchez, No. 26-40653, seeking to halt his deportation and secure his release. The court had issued no final ruling when the report was published.
Three days after that petition was filed, the full Fifth Circuit ruled, by ten votes to seven, that certain immigrants held under mandatory detention have no automatic constitutional right to an individual bond hearing, a decision that reaches Cubans detained in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Before emigrating, Alba took part in a Cuban medical mission in Brazil under the Mais Médicos program and left it voluntarily, a decision that brought sanctions within Cuba's public health system and barred him from practicing again on the island. In the United States he worked as a medical assistant at a Houston clinic.
CiberCuba cites other Cuban doctors on I-220A forms in similar situations: José Enrique Batista Méndez, arrested in San Antonio in June 2025, and Álvaro Zapata Inza, who also left a mission in Brazil and has been held since June 2025 in south Texas.
Sources: CiberCuba
Data updated: 2026-11-12T04:15:00.000Z