Several groups of people leaving Cuba for U.S. reach popular beach in the Florida Keys



David Goodhue
Thu, December 15, 2022 at 10:22 AM EST






Multiple groups of people leaving Cuba for the United States arrived in the Florida Keys on Thursday morning, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

At least two landings happened near Sombrero Beach in the Middle Keys city of Marathon just after midnight, said Adam Hoffner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s division chief for Miami operations.

Both groups — one with seven people, the other with four — came to shore on rustic, homemade boats between 1 and 2 a.m., Hoffner said. One person was taken by local paramedics to an area hospital to be evaluated for dehydration, Hoffner said.

Hoffner and Keys law enforcement sources said several other groups arrived Thursday morning in the Marquesas, a group of uninhabited islands 20 miles west of Key West, which have become a frequent landing spot for migrants since an exodus from Cuba — the likes not seen in nearly a decade — began about two years ago.

As of 10 a.m. Thursday, Hoffner said agents were dealing with five migrant landings.

It’s been an extremely busy week for Border Patrol agents assigned to the Keys, as well as for Coast Guard crews patrolling offshore the island chain. Since Sunday, Border Patrol agents have already taken into custody more than 276 people from Cuba who’ve landed somewhere on the archipelago.

The Coast Guard announced Wednesday that it returned 152 people from it intercepted at sea since the day before trying to migrate to the U.S. Since October, the service has stopped 2,982 Cubans along the Florida Straits.

At this pace, the number of at-sea interceptions by the Coast Guard is on track to triple the amount of people stopped between Oct. 1, 2021 and September 2022 — 6,182. That was already the highest number of interdictions in nearly 10 years.

The Border Patrol said in a statement earlier this week that it has encountered five times the amount of Cuban migrants in South Florida since October — mostly in the Keys — than the agency did in the same time frame this time last year.

When the statement was issued, the number was 2,350 people. With Thursday’s landings, that number is closer to 2,630 and counting.




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