Deporting the sick to a foreign continent
By Philip Cardella October 24, 2026
Miami, FL
On 20 October 2026 I received notification of an emergency press conference being held about an hour and a half after I got the message. The purpose of the conference: to tell the world what ICE was telling detainees in Miami's Krome Detention Center, they were about to be deported to Africa perhaps because they were too sick to stay in American detention.
I was on the road but rushed home to participate as an observer and member of the independent media.
"Relatives of gravely ill detainees at two Florida immigration jails say authorities are about to deport their loved ones to unknown countries in Africa despite worsening medical conditions," read the lede in Richard Luscombe's story for The Guardian.
USA Today's Maria Luisa Paúl's piece, entitled "He'll die there," gravely ill detainees face deportation to Africa," opened similarly. "About a dozen detained immigrants with serious medical conditions have been told they will be deported to African countries where they have no family or other ties and, advocates fear, little hope of receiving the care that has kept them alive."
From the Guardian:
Anisley Cortés, the wife of Noslén Sendra, a 41-year-old Cuban national, said her husband had been incarcerated since last November, first at the now closed “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail, and at Krome since April. She said her husband has uncontrolled diabetes and acute pancreatitis that resulted in a weeks-long hospital stay earlier this year.
“He lost over 50 pounds. They wouldn’t give him his medication, and they would not give him enough food. It was a nightmare of a time for all of us,” she said. “He is very sick and needs the right healthcare.
“Cuba will not accept him as a deportee, and we now have proof that Mexico will not accept him as a deportee because he is so sick. And so they told him that because he could not be accepted at either of those two countries, ‘Oh well, we’re going to have to send you to Africa.’
“They told him that Mexico would not accept him because he has too many medications that he requires, and so they said, ‘Well, we have to deport you anyway.’ We’re left with the uncertainty of not knowing how he is, or if we’ll see him again.”
I really don't know what to add to the reporting by The Guardian and USA Today other than to report what it was like being in the press conference.
In a word, it was hard.
As outlined in NPR Miami affiliate WLRN's outstanding Immigration by Design podcast, Krome Detention Center, which is on the western edge of Miami's urban sprawl, is one of the most pivotal and criticized centers of US immigration denial of due process.
You can't get to Alligator Alcatraz or to most of the entrances to Everglades National Park from Miami without driving past it. It's literally a bike ride away from my house. The facility itself sits in a converted surface to missile base, a relic to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the ongoing immigration waves that Castro's reign in the island nation triggered.
While few of the political ads we see on tv in Miami mention immigration, and so far as I can tell, no local news outlet covered this story (though reporters from all of the major outfits were in the call) the immigration crisis facing America is still real, ongoing and is in many ways at its worst in Miami-Dade County, the US County with more than half of the population being born outside the United States.
