Mexico City/In 15 days, 20 Cubans have been arrested in Cancun for alcohol and drug use and street fights. For the president of the Business Security Commission of the Mexican city of Quintana Roo, Jorge Escudero Buerba, there is something more serious than these crimes: “corruption within the National Migration Institute” (INM).
Many of the Cubans who arrive in Mexican territory, says Escudero Buerba, have permits that they have obtained irregularly with the immigration authorities themselves. At the INM, he states, for “4,200 or 5,000 dollars they get the deportees their papers and give them a temporary one for two years so that they can then have full residency.”
Regarding the island’s nationals, the businessman insists that “those who emigrate come with the desire to work and look for a better way of life to be able to help their family,” and he regrets that when trying to regularize themselves, Immigration delays the procedures. “They do it so that they get desperate, raise that money and do it irregularly.”
Despite the discomfort of the residents of Cancun due to the increase in altercations, the authorities of Quintana Roo have minimized the number of arrests, arguing that they are minor crimes. The director of the Civic Courts of Cancun, Jorge Rivero Pech, said that many of these administrative failures are due in part to the fact that many citizens of the Island have not adapted to where they are now.
“Those who emigrate come with the desire to work and look for a better way of life to be able to help their family”
“We make them see that, that they have to adapt to the situation and the country, because the complaints have been for disturbing the order, for how they speak, for how they behave, many of them are consuming alcohol, some type of drug on public roads, and that is why there are many reports of these citizens who are on public roads doing these types of situations,” he stated. After inviting them to avoid problems and paying a fine, he assured, the detainees are released.
As for the complaints of corruption in Immigration, they come from a long time ago. In 2019, the then Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, recognized that the INM “was one of the institutions in which corruption was most penetrated” and promised to clean it up. Months later, it was reported that 1,040 agents had resigned due to various anomalies.
An agent of the Institute recognized in 2023 N+Focus that at the airport where he worked there was a corruption network to facilitate the irregular entry of migrants. Through the so-called “attentions”, the superiors told them which people they should let pass without question and, at the end of the shift, they received money as payment. To hide these operations, immigration records were manipulated and alleged “human errors” were taken advantage of, erasing the traces of travelers.
“We make them see that, that they have to adapt to the situation and the country, because the complaints have been about disturbing the order”
According to their testimony, even when a migrant did not meet the legal entry requirements, supervisors altered the procedures to authorize their entry. The scheme operated during the Administration of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), despite promises to combat corruption. Although complaints against immigration officials increased, sanctions and suspensions decreased considerably.
Escudero Buerba insists 14ymedio in which the Mexican authorities must review “what type of migrants they are receiving from the United States” and specified that the Cubans that Donald Trump’s Government is removing are “people who lived there for years and who have a record and are being deported, those are the ones who come tainted.”
Last December, Olivera Cuban who was abandoned in Chiapas without documents or money along with 37 other expelled migrants, denounced that the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) was deporting criminals to Mexico. “He erases their records before crossing them,” he told this newspaper.
The business security representative remembers that the last week of May a Cuban singer was shot. Wally del Valle, 29 years old and a native of Trinidad (Sancti Spíritus) “had a history” in the United States, a country where he arrived in 2019. The exchange of information through social networks confirmed that the man settled in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked as part of the security team for the singer Yosvanis Sierra Hernández, known in the artistic world as Chocolate MC. Last year he was arrested and “in September he was deported after being sentenced for human trafficking.”
Mexican authorities must review “what type of migrants they are receiving from the United States”
At the end of May, some Cubans on a motorcycle shot at a person’s car on Bonampak Avenue. “They had been following him from superblock 77,” says the same source.
To this case is added that of Yoexyanother Cuban national, who was arrested last April for speeding on a motorcycle. Upon verifying his information, it was found that “he was wanted by the authorities of Tampa, Florida, where he faces charges for the crime of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances,” says Escudero Buerba. “We have to see what kind of people are entering and who is getting us into trouble. The truth is, the United States is deporting the worst there is.”
Between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026, the United States Government deported 12,977 migrants from third countries to Mexico. Of that group, 4,353 are Cubans and 592 of them are stranded in Quintana Roo.
