News · Migration
A Cuban who arrived in the Mariel exodus says ICE tried to deport her to Mexico as a “self-deportee”
Dolores Freixa, who arrived in the United States at 11, says she was taken out of an Arizona detention center before dawn and presented at the border with a self-deportation document bearing a signature that was not hers, according to an investigation by The Florida Trib.
Dolores Freixa, who arrived in the United States at 11 during the Mariel exodus, was woken in June at three in the morning at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and put on a bus with some 40 men, most of them Mexican, bound for the Mexican border, according to The Florida Trib investigation picked up by CiberCuba. No one told her where she was being taken.
On reaching the border she refused to get off the bus, told the officer the transfer was illegal and pointed out that the signature on the document was not hers. She was taken back to the Arizona center, an exception among those who have gone through the same situation. Freixa served a 2015 sentence for robbery, theft and fraud and was moved straight into immigration detention on leaving prison.
The mechanism behind those transfers is third-country deportation, used when the Cuban government refuses to take back its nationals, which happens systematically with people who have criminal records or who left the island before 2017. The United States sends them to Mexico under a non-public agreement: according to Third Country Deportation Watch, more than 25,000 people have been sent to 29 countries since January 2025.
Sources: CiberCuba
Data updated: 2026-10-25T20:00:00.000Z