The Trump administration has deported as many as 6,000 Cubans to Mexico over the past year through an unwritten agreement with its southern neighbor, according to a federal judge pressing the government to explain how the opaque arrangement between the neighboring countries works.

In a nine-page order filed Wednesday, U.S. District Judge William G. Young in Massachusetts quoted a Department of Homeland Security declaration acknowledging a “standing” but “unwritten” agreement in which Mexico accepts Cuban deportees from the United States.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement “has deported about 6,000 Cuban nationals to Mexico in the last year,” and “no travel documents are necessary,” the DHS brief to the court said.

Young, who was appointed to the federal judiciary by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, was baffled by the revelations from the Trump administration in the case, which stems from the case of a Cuban man challenging his ICE detention and pending deportation to Mexico.

“What? Can this be true? There’s some unwritten deal between two sovereign nations whereby 6,000 Cuban nationals have already been shipped to Mexico? Is this deal secret?” Young said in his order. “Put aside the striking illogic of arguing, ‘We’re already doing this on a grand scale so it must be ok,’ this is but a stark admission that here there’s no process at all beyond, ‘It is what we say it is.’”

Restricted details

To carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, the government has aggressively tried to persuade other countries to accept deportations of nationals not their own. In October, Cubans deported from the U.S. to Mexico told the Miami Herald they had spent weeks looking for food, shelter and work while sleeping on the streets. The men had serious criminal convictions and said Cuba would not take them back as a result. But it’s unclear whether all the people the U.S. has sent to Mexico have arrests and convictions on their records.

Many of the details in the federal case, including the Homeland Security documents that reveal the number of deported Cubans as well as the wrongful detention complaint, are restricted from public view. But Young’s order reveals the scope of the deportation operation, which both governments have kept largely quiet. It also shows the lack of clarity around the agreement even within the U.S. government.

Government attorneys had told Young they would provide the written agreement — but then said that it didn’t exist. The veteran judge wrote that the court must become informed of “everything there is to know” about the agreement and that he wanted material proof of it, even if the accord is not in writing.

“If such an unwritten agreement exists, of course there will be written evidence of it — directives, briefing papers, internal correspondence, all the debris of a functioning bureaucracy. This court expects to see it all,” wrote Young. “Step back and take a breath. Can it be true that 6,000 Cuban nationals have already been sent to Mexico on a handshake?”

The judge’s order is the latest development in a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration by a Cuban man ICE detained in Boston last month during a check-in appointment at an ICE field office.

The court documents say the man, Jorge Juan Navarro, came to the U.S. in 1992 and was convicted of criminal offenses in 1998 and 2009. The federal government ordered him deported around November 2001, and he’s been complying with ICE check-ins since 2014, according to Wednesday’s order.

It’s unclear from the judge’s writings or publicly available documents of the case why Navarro was ordered deported a quarter of a century ago or what his crimes were. So far, he remains in ICE custody. However, there is a stay on his deportation to Mexico for now.

“There has been no evidence that the Government of Mexico has specifically accepted Mr. Juan Navarro as a deportee,” his lawyer wrote in a document in the case dated from March 20.

Biden-era accord

In a written statement to the Herald, Navarro’s lawyer, Heather Perez Arroyo, said her client was “grateful” for the federal judge’s order.

“My client brought this petition to the federal court to assert his rights under the law and the Constitution. We have faith in the judicial system, and it is doing what it is designed to do – protecting our legal rights and ensuring that the government acts in a manner that is lawful and transparent,” said Perez Arroyo, a senior immigration attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

According to the judge’s order, Homeland Security is arguing that the legal basis of the deportations stems from a Biden-era agreement in which Mexico agreed to accept up to 30,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans to Mexico. But that agreement was contingent on a program that allowed people from the four countries to live and work in the U.S. as long as they had a financial sponsor, passed background checks and paid for their own airfare. The Trump administration killed the “CNHV program,” as it was called after the initials for the four nationalities involved, but appears to be using the Biden-era agreement with Mexico as a justification for the deportations in Young’s courtroom.

“Based on this agreement and successful removal, it is clear that Cuba was considered to be impractical, inadvisable, or impossible,” Homeland Security attorneys said in the brief, captured in a quote within Young’s order.

Young raised concerns about the legitimacy, and even the existence, of the agreement.

“At this juncture, the Court takes Respondents’ counsel at her word that such an agreement actually exists and is not some post-hoc figment of ICE’s imagination or worse, a cloak for chicanery,” Young said in a footnote to his order.

Difficulties deporting to Cuba

The United States has long deemed Cuba a “recalcitrant” country that is not cooperative when it comes to deportations. Cuba has previously paused deportations at will, including for a year during the COVID-19 pandemic. It historically not taken back its nationals who are convicted of certain crimes in the United States.

That means many Cubans in the U.S. who have criminal records have lived here for years, even decades, in legal limbo. They can’t return to Cuba, but cannot obtain green cards or American citizenship.

Cuba did take back Cubans with rap sheets last month, according to Homeland Security. But that unusual announcement came in the middle of a U.S. pressure campaign that is choking the island’s oil supply, which might explain the concession on Havana’s part.

Many of the Cubans deported to Mexico have ended up in the southern city of Villahermosa. A shelter there, the Oasis De Paz Del Espiritu Santo Amparito, received 206 Cubans in 2025, one of its administrators, Josue Martinez Leal, told the Herald on Thursday.

So far this year, about 45 Cubans deported from the U.S. have shown up seeking shelter and services. Many of the Cubans deported from the U.S. are older men with chronic conditions, Martinez Leal said. Their influx has strained resources, as the shelter tries to help them secure medication and care for illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension and dementia.

Controversial deportations

On Monday, Costa Rica joined the scores of countries that have agreed to take U.S. deportees, announcing it would accept up to 25 people a week. Other countries that have taken nationals not their own include Panama, Cameroon, El Salvador, Eswatini, Ecuador, Ghana, Rwanda and Honduras. These third-country deportations have been the subject of fierce litigation in the federal courts under the Trump administration.

In March 2025, the Trump administration deported over 200 Venezuelans it accused of being gang members to CECOT, a notorious prison in El Salvador. A joint investigation from the Texas Tribune and ProPublica later found that DHS was aware most of the men did not have criminal records in the U.S.

Since returning to Venezuela last year, the men have described facing inhumane conditions, psychological abuse, physical beatings and sexual violence during their time in the Salvadoran prison.

Just this week, one of the men Venezuelan men who had been sent from the U.S. to the megaprison sued the Trump administration for at least $1.3 million in damages. He accused the federal government of deliberately abusing its power and violating his rights.

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