Guayaquil, ECUADOR — Rogelio Bolufé stared out the porthole of the white Boeing 767 as the landing gear hummed to life. He eyed endless green fields, a sparkling expanse of water, and a sprawling city along a river. The 44-year-old Cuban, who’d lost months of his life inside the vast network of U.S. immigration jails, was staring at his new purgatory: southern Ecuador.
His mind wasn’t on the reality of being stranded in this strange place; that despair would swallow him later. Instead, his thoughts were fixed on the piles of documents that had been taken by prison guards and vanished.
And now, he thought, I disappear too.
His deportee companions, mostly returning Ecuadorians and men from neighboring Peru, talked themselves into a frenzy over how they’d show journalists on the ground the deep and dark impressions on their wrists — evidence that they’d been tightly bound for more than 24 hours in hot and mostly stationary buses and planes with little water and infuriating discomfort. But when the plane landed at Aeropuerto Internacional José Joaquín de Olmedo minutes before noon on June 1, the tarmac was empty. Bolufé heard one man ask: “Don’t people worry about us?”
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He was still wearing his dark green prison clothes when he stepped into the scorching midday sun, down the stairs and onto the runway. An American man in uniform handed him a sheet of paper.
“Pasaporte de emergencia,” it read. “Ecuatoriano nacido en Ecuador.”
Bolufé shot the man a confused look. The document was a blatant lie. Bolufé was not an “Ecuadorian born in Ecuador.” The Department of Homeland Security knew that. It was in his case file and detention records and plastered all over the internet thanks to his minor celebrity status in political circles back in Miami’s Little Havana.
But it had been days since he’d slept. And Bolufé had just ended an 11-day hunger strike over worsening detention conditions back in the United States, a protest he suspected had landed him this one-way trip to one of the most notorious cities in South America. In a split second, Bolufé decided he would not object. There was no way he’d wait for this to sort itself out while trapped at a local jail cell in the narco cartel city of Guayaquil. That would be a death sentence.
He handed the paper to an Ecuadorian immigration officer (who kept it), nodded when asked to verify the details, and was soon handed a blue drawstring bag from the Red Cross. Bolufé made his way to the airport’s passenger waiting area and sat on a black chair in the shadow of a silvery escalator. He pulled a bottle of milk from the bag and downed it in seconds.
For the next half hour, he considered his options. The U.S. government had ditched him in a foreign country with no money, no cellphone and no passport. His drab prison uniform, disheveled hair, and two-month scraggly beard made him unapproachable. His only identification was a green prison wristband and a CoreCivic commissary card — not official and, if anything, red flags.
Rogelio Enrique Bolufé Izquierdo — a Cuban man who had made his way through the archipelago of U.S. immigration detention centers, surviving the swampy dangers of Alligator Alcatraz in Florida and the frigid cells of an El Paso jail in Texas and the spreading diseases at Camp East Montana — was stuck.
* * *
Few Americans think of Ecuador, but when they do it’s usually in transit to the country’s national treasure: the Galápagos Islands. Lesser known is Guayaquil, a bustling port city that was once the global gateway for chocolate beans — historians recall how the thick and sweet aroma of drying cacao once hung over the entire town a century ago. Now, it’s probably where your bananas come from.
Guayaquil is situated 50 miles up the Guayas River from the Pacific Ocean, which makes it a key stop for cocaine cartels in nearby Colombia and Peru, and so the city has recently been overrun by crime.
In January 2024, the city briefly captured attention when more than a dozen gangsters with shotguns, submachine guns and sticks of dynamite took over a live broadcast of a local TV news station. By then, the nation that once boasted the lowest crime level in the region had become the most dangerous in the southern half of the globe. Guayaquil and the city of Durán, just across the river, have a combined homicide rate of roughly 90 per 100,000 — significantly higher than the District of Columbia’s darkest days in the 1990s. Even Guayaquil’s mayor, Aquiles Álvarez, has been arrested on corruption charges — and recently swore he’d keep leading from behind bars. (Last week, he received a three-year prison sentence.)
Even the airport isn’t safe. In mid-June, the leader of a gang called Los Águilas had just left the airport when two teens holding flower bouquets walked up and shot him dead.
But that only hints at the deteriorating situation on the ground, where thugs demand vacunas — which literally translates to “vaccines” but refers to the tolls paid to cross gang-controlled streets, a foreign concept for Ecuadorians that only appeared with the recent arrival of Tren de Aragua gangsters from Venezuela.
Politically, Ecuador has become an echo of the United States. President Daniel Noboa has drawn public ridicule over his obsession with President Donald Trump: Both are rich guys who own a ton of shiny real estate and ran on promises of returning their countries to greatness.
Ecuador is also undergoing a nativist phase, blaming its problems on Venezuelan migrants. Bolufé and others deported there face a government that accepted them to acquiesce to a United States whose power looms large: Ecuador essentially has no control over its monetary policy, having ditched its currency 26 years ago and adopted the U.S. dollar.
Under Noboa, a U.S. citizen born in Miami, the country has become something of a client state — willing to accept scores of deportees like Bolufé but also giving American security forces broad license in the jungle. In June, he signed a decree granting U.S. troops immunity from criminal charges when going to war with alleged drug traffickers. The move came just months after a joint operation blew up a compound that locals professed was actually a dairy farm.
The U.S. government has designated the rival gangs Los Choneros and Los Lobos as foreign terrorist organizations. And the State Department has warned Americans not to travel north or south of a street that splits Guayaquil in half due to terrorism and crime — essentially making the entire city a no-go zone.
That profile makes it a curious deportation destination, as it’s become for more than 1,800 Cubans since the start of the second Trump administration. The strategy is a consequence of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s mission to rid the U.S. of undocumented people as quickly as possible, even through “third-country removals.” The July 2025 agreement between the United States and Ecuador pledges to seek a “dignified, safe, and timely transfer.” In reality, deportees’ final stop is a perilous place.
“It’s ‘plata o plomo,’” one former diplomat told me, echoing Pablo Escobar’s famous ultimatum: silver or lead.
“You either turn your eyes and get paid to look the other way or they kill you — and they start with your family,” the diplomat said. “It rivals the worst of conflicted places in Mexico.”
* * *
Bolufé knew he was in dire straits as soon as he walked out of the Guayaquil airport. He had no money, but he couldn’t receive a bank wire without identification. He couldn’t contact his ex-girlfriend via social media to send documents or money, because he couldn’t log in from a new and distant IP address without an incoming text to verify it was him. He couldn’t start a new online account without a phone number. And he couldn’t buy a phone.
He’d always been a hustler, having sold DirectTV and internet-connected computers growing up in communist Cuba. Now his old ways kicked in. He decided he’d offer a taxi driver money he didn’t have. He strode past the Japanese koi pond and palm trees and made a straight shot for the back of the airport taxi line, betting that the last driver was most pressed for time. He played it cool and offered the man a hefty $20 an hour for a four-hour tour of the city.
They first stopped at the Sheraton and its pristine lobby decked out with modern art, where a concierge took one look at Bolufé’s prison uniform and informed him no rooms were available. Bolufé continued behind the lobby to look up other hotels on a public computer — but also to Google himself.
In the insular world of Cuban expatriate politics, Bolufé is a much-maligned enigma. Conservative blogs claim he was once a member of Fidel Castro’s personal security team and an agent for the Interior Ministry, which controls internal politics with secret police. Meanwhile, the Cuban government has branded him a terrorist and accused him of “fomenting, financing, and executing actions of sabotage” against the authoritarian regime there. Bolufé swears the truth is somewhere in between, saying he was part of a special class of insiders close to the Castro family who went by the name Departamento 0, an off-the-books task force authorized to eliminate bureaucracy by “zeroing out” bad policies — think DOGE, not assassinations.
The next stop was the Marriott, where the lobby smelled like vanilla and a rack of Panama hats lined the left wall. By then, the taxi driver knew something was wrong. Bolufé had borrowed his phone to reach out to his ex-girlfriend, Haymel de la Vega, who promptly sent a picture of his Cuban passport while a cousin promised to wire funds. That image was enough to book a room, but the driver was still in the lurch. To calm him while the wire made its way south, Bolufé offered to buy a round of beers at the hotel bar — with money he didn’t yet have. They ordered Cerveza Club Premium and sat at a glossy wooden table for two in the corner, beneath a white geometric wall where the uplighting cast sharp shadows. Bolufé remembered discussing “banal, trivial things” for hours until the driver was alerted by phone that the wire had come through. They snuck out of the restaurant and left an open tab while they picked up the cash.
It was well past midnight by the time Bolufé managed to pay the driver, hotel and bar. He took the elevator to the Marriott’s top floor and sat by the pool, “just to appreciate the beauty of it.” He was still in his prison uniform. He hadn’t bathed in two days, and once again, he was penniless. He spent an hour on a lawn chair by the pool’s bright green astroturf deck, staring at the mirror-like water and imagining what it would feel like to jump in.
The next two weeks were a dizzying maze as Bolufé moved to cheaper and cheaper lodging to match the trickle of funds coming in from friends.
On Day 2, a faraway buddy used a shady online broker to order a smartphone that died hours after Bolufé picked it up. He ended up acquiring an “ENV,” a local brand that features a spartan helmet on the back. He grew wary as he took stock of the situation in the streets. Armed robbery is such an everyday affair that no sensible person wears a backpack on their back, and even old ladies wear them like stomach pouches. Private security guards in vests stand by the doors of coffee shops, grocers and the indigenous artisanal market downtown. And given that robbers nearly all ride motorcycles for a quick getaway, pedestrians on the sidewalk reflexively head further from the road when they rev by. It was no wonder the country’s president had decreed an “internal armed conflict” with nearly two dozen criminal groups labeled terrorists.
On Day 10, he managed to open an account at a local bank by bribing the teller with the bulk of the $120 a friend had sent. Transaction records on the app show he gets about $20 a day, usually from the same dedicated friend.
It wasn’t until Day 17 that another friend flew in from Miami — and was too nervous to leave the hotel. He dropped off a suitcase with Bolufé’s Cuban passport and a few clothes — black sweatpants and a Hawke & Co. jacket. Someone had heard it was winter south of the equator. Technically, yes, but in Ecuador that means 90-degree days and constant rain.
One of Bolufé’s half-dozen stops was a tiny Airbnb apartment that gave him the creeps. His suspicions turned out well-founded: One night, just before midnight, he was watching Netflix naked in bed when a man barged in, dressed all in black. Bolufé reached for a chef’s knife in the kitchen. “Well, that’s it, we’re ready to die,” he said, and pushed the man out. When he hurriedly texted the proprietor, he got the sense that the man was in on it. Nowhere seemed safe.
* * *
I first came across Bolufé while researching allegations of human rights violations at Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades.
How he got there was a tale unto its own. He had once run a club in Havana, but he got stuck on a trip to Miami during the COVID-19 closures. Without a work visa, he got by on eBay selling rare Cuban literature he found at an estate sale. He remade himself in Miami as someone who books reggaeton performers, and it was after a recording session on Aug. 17, 2025, that his crew got pulled over by Hialeah cops who wrote in their report that they found “a small clear plastic baggie with white powdery substance resembling cocaine” in his pocket when he stepped out of his client’s Lamborghini. Bolufé posted bail, but Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents grabbed him, hauling him to the new swamp detention camp that had become the butt of Trump’s jokes. “Don’t run in a straight line,” the president once said, making a zig-zag motion with his hands to advise on how to avoid getting eaten by alligators.
When Bolufé called the only number he could remember — the one belonging to his ex-girlfriend — she was bewildered.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You don’t do drugs.”
De la Vega, a health care consultant armed with ChatGPT and a dream of one day being a lawyer, helped him write habeas corpus lawsuits in 2025. She spent hours organizing documents, figuring out how to file them and talking to reporters. Bolufé lodged an asylum claim, arguing that the same Cuban government that branded him a terrorist would harm him. De la Vega’s aspirations wilted when her ex-boyfriend’s fellow inmates begged for her help too. By the time she connected me with him, she sounded exhausted.
In the months that followed, Bolufé became my connection within the ICE detention system.
He attested to how guards were punishing prisoners by forcing them into a small cage on the tarmac of the converted airport, exposed to the swamp’s blistering summer sun and relentless mosquitos. His eyes grew wide when he described what it felt like to be chained to an eyebolt on the floor, forced to wear a thin prison outfit while surrounded by guards in parkas as the air in the massive prison tent dropped to what felt like 40 degrees.
At one point, he sent me a petition signed by him and 39 fellow detainees from Brazil, Guatemala, Haiti and elsewhere that read “I was tortured in Alligator Alcatraz.” Bolufé’s accompanying statement said, “The lights stayed on 24 hours a day, and there were constant noises of chains hitting the floor, along with headcounts up to 20 times per day, making it impossible to sleep or rest.”
While at New Mexico’s Torrance County Detention Facility, he connected me to men who alleged mistreatment after witnessing guards suffocate to death Cuban detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana in Texas. And he flooded my P.O. box with letters and collected signatures from fellow detainees decrying the conditions behind bars at ICE facilities nationwide. He even helped organize La Union de Secuestrados por ICE, a kind of union of detainees “kidnapped by ICE.” Sketches by one inmate depict scenes from inside the compound: fungus growing on an Igloo water cooler and mold spreading from a crack in the wall to an air conditioning vent.
To pass the time, Bolufé read Nietzsche, The Alchemist, and Sun Tzu, gifts from friends on the outside. He started petitions, filed countless grievances, and went on something of a crusade demanding that the private prison contractor CoreCivic build a proper legal library at its New Mexico detention facility. Bolufé considered it absurdist humor when what eventually appeared was a tiny reading nook — with fiction books.
On May 7, guards snatched two boxes of his personal documents. Bolufé went on a hunger strike. ICE ping-ponged him across the country — a tactic he thought was an attempt to break him. Government records show he was transferred from the New Mexico jail to Camp East Montana, then to the overcrowded Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, then to the privately run Northwest ICE Processing Center in Washington, and finally to two other ICE locations in Arizona. The strangest leg of that tour was an 1,100-mile flight aboard an Embraer 145. Bolufé and a single other detainee were placed aboard the 50-seat private jet surrounded by guards — something he complained was a waste of American taxpayer funds. Gillian Brockell, an independent journalist who tracks ICE flights, pointed to government contracting price sheets that estimate the flight cost upwards of $25,000, not including fuel and insurance.
An immigration judge rejected Bolufé’s asylum claim. The stated reason for deportation was straightforward: Bolufé had overstayed his tourist visa that expired in July 2020. His journey through ICE detention came to an end when the Board of Immigration Appeals — which has been largely replaced by appointees aligned with MAGA’s maximalist deportation policies — wouldn’t reconsider the ruling.
Asked by NOTUS about the circumstances of his deportation and the inaccurate paperwork he received, DHS asserted that Bolufé has dual citizenship in Ecuador — something he immediately rejected. Bolufé said he briefly ran a bar in a Cuban neighborhood in northern Ecuador 15 years ago but returned to Cuba.
“I’m a Cuban citizen, born in Cuba on January 25, 1982 at 11:00 at night at the Línea maternity hospital,” he texted me. “I’m not an Ecuadorian citizen, nor do I have citizenship in any other country.”
As for Bolufé’s personal effects, DHS told NOTUS that “ICE ensures all of their personal property is controlled and safeguarded” but did not say what happened to his diary or other possessions. The department also said that “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities is FALSE,” adding that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”
DHS did not answer questions about third-country removals to Ecuador or the safety concerns around transporting migrants to a place like Guayaquil. Instead, it offered a warning to other undocumented immigrants.
“Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App. The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now,” an unidentified spokesperson emailed NOTUS on Tuesday afternoon.
* * *
When Bolufé reached out to me in mid-June, he was at a cheap hotel in a terrible part of Guayaquil, calling from a number I didn’t recognize.
“I can’t even begin to explain how illegal this is,” he said in Spanish on the phone, his usual cheery tone replaced by one of utter exasperation. “I look homeless. It’s just inhumane, leaving someone with that degree of vulnerability in a country with this level of crime.”
A week later, I met him at the rundown Hotel Presidente Economy. The sagging porte-cochère faces a dilapidated street where men with hard stares stand by their off-road bikes and women spend their days building papier-mâché statues they hope to sell at Christmastime. The hotel entrance’s heavy metal doors are kept locked at all times, but the rooms have loose knobs that barely keep them shut. Windows face the corrugated tin roofs of the nearby buildings. Salsa and reggaeton blast late into the night, and the occasional gunshots barely register above the music and the street dogs that begin to howl around midnight. It’s a block north of Portete de Tarqui — that street the State Department uses to divide the scary part of town from the other scary part of town.
In Room 102, Bolufé’s clothes were piled in the corner near a pink suitcase — evidence of the thin lifeline he maintains to friends in Miami. The RCA air-conditioning unit on the wall struggled to keep up with the heat and squealed like a dying car engine. Bolufé sighed, wondering if he’d have to change rooms.
“All this moving around has me really uneasy,” he said. “I’ve had too many changes in the last few days.”
His most pressing concern was that Meta spam controls kept locking him out of his WhatsApp account for hours at a time. That tether of hope kept getting snipped.
“It’s every day, Monday to Monday,” he said, holding up his phone. “I’ve been here for 20 days, and in those 20 days, this happens every day, at all hours.”
Bolufé had $100.44 in the bank and was sporting the unmistakable thin strap of a cheap, black Casio F-91W watch. His nails were long, but his hair was short. The unkempt beard was now trimmed into a goatee of sorts. He moved slowly and shook as he spoke, chain-smoking Camel Blues while sipping the free coffee from the lobby. The machine would break the next day, but at that moment the brew was hot.
We found chairs surrounded by stone walls in a back alcove. The Ecuador-Germany World Cup game played on a TV nearby. When Ecuador scored its winning goal, car horns blared on Ambato Avenue. Cheers erupted in the streets. Bolufé took a long drag from his cigarette.
“My life has been an accident,” he said.
He would have been busy at that moment if those jail guards hadn’t taken his personal diary. Bolufé had dreamed of leaving ICE detention — how exactly was always a hazy idea — and writing a memoir he hoped would one day echo the tales of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.
“I’m not a materialist person,” he said. “But when they took away my papers, that actually hurt. How are you going to take away the pitiful little proof I have against you? How can you fight for your rights against the very power that’s imprisoning you? They have all the best lawyers, and all that money, and here I am with my little papers.”
The conversation shifted to his past life in Cuba. Behind audacious sunglasses I keep asking him to take off, Bolufé swore he knew everybody: Fidel Castro’s adult kids — even secret ones — who fell under his watch, musical artists he discovered on the street, influential government officials. He kept insisting he was a self-made man with all the right connections. But where were they now?
Bolufé stared at his phone while scrolling WhatsApp. If they didn’t check in on him now, he said, they probably never really cared.
His primary concern was how to get by each day, which was difficult enough in a place where some coffee shops and taxis request an Ecuadorian government ID number just to hand over a receipt. But the gnawing concern in the background was figuring out how to get out of the country. The way he landed there, he feared, could make escape harder.
“I have the stigma of being deported here,” he told me, “and having been deported here is already a very bad mark against you when applying for a visa to any other country.”
Over the next few days, Bolufé mostly stayed holed up inside the hotel, too proud to say he was afraid to venture out but forthcoming enough to admit he wanted nothing to do with the battered streets of the city’s Ayacucho district. He’d become a regular at the Capitán Barbosa because it was right around the corner and the flamboyant restaurateur Ricki let him rack up a tab. One evening, an old man with a belly as round as his plate’s mound of white rice motioned for Bolufé to swing by. The viejito whispered a warning: A woman was robbed at gunpoint at our table the night before. We sat down, and my companion pulled out his ENV phone to show me something. The old man grunted and shook his head. Don’t pull it out, idiot.
One morning, I ventured to a corner bakery on the street mentioned in the State Department advisory. Battered police pickups sped by every few minutes. Rival gangs fight over these city blocks, also claimed by a little black mutt who marked his territory on the northeast corner of Portete de Tarqui and Seis de Marzo. When it was time to pay for a beef empanada, I reached into my pocket and found it empty. I glanced back just in time to see my missing $5 bill in the thick fingers of a stout man, rubbing it to examine his discovery. He glanced at the sky, and made the sign of the cross. I let him keep it.
Later, I persuaded Bolufé to guide me around the city so I could retrace his steps, first at the airport then at various hotels. During lunch at one point, he stressed the need to start planting roots at this new place he refused to call home.
“I need to socialize and make some connections,” he said. “In reality, I’m quite alone here.”
It was a Friday, and Bolufé decided he’d start at the most unlikely of places in this typically Catholic city, where nuns can be seen picking up a salty pan de ambato at pastry shops. Bolufé claims to have converted to Islam sometime during his 286-day ICE detention, having discovered the benefits of that tight-knit community behind bars. So we visited the Centro Islámico Guayaquil for its Salah al-Jum’ah midday service. The imam, speaking in Spanish but singing recitations in Arabic, said exactly what Bolufé needed to hear: The misfortunes one endures are nothing — all that matters are the teachings of Allah.
“Islam does not depend on the life and death of others,” the imam repeated.
Afterward, three dozen men set up a table and distributed free styrofoam containers of rice, potato salad and shredded beef.
“Óyeme, this food is great,” Bolufé chimed in, hoping to spark conversation with potential new friends. “Who’s the chef?”
“The sisters cooked it,” responded a baby-faced man to our right.
“One would hope one of the sisters is single,” said another to our left, drawing chuckles all around.
Bolufé began to work the room, settling in on a beefy guy in a skullcap who carried himself like a man who’d done time. After a brief chat, Bolufé raced back.
“He’s a Cuban from Miami!” he whispered.
“Also deported?” I asked.
“He doesn’t want to tell me yet.”
* * *
In another part of town, inside a tall tower and behind four locked doors, is a local non-governmental organization called the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights. Its president, Billy Navarette, listened intently as I described Bolufé’s situation. The organization is concerned about what it means to have so many foreigners dumped into a city that’s become a battleground for drug cartels that could prey on desperate migrants.
“Inevitably, they’ll need to talk to these gangsters,” he said. “It’s a reality. They have control.”
He assessed Bolufé’s situation. A Cuban passport wouldn’t get Bolufé far, because it bore no stamp of him having entered the country — thanks to the inaccurate paperwork Bolufé was handed on his way in.
“It’s something extraordinary,” Navarette said.
Navarette thought about what to do. With some work — and some pleading with Ecuadorian officials — CDH might be able to get Bolufé’s documents in order so he can legally be present in Ecuador. Until then, it’s dangerous for him to go anywhere without an ID. Bolufé is once again an undocumented immigrant. I told Navarette how Bolufé, in a fit of inspiration, had concocted an idea to put together a reggaeton event in neighboring Peru later in the summer. Navarette winced.
“His asylum application in the United States could prove useful here,” he said. “But it’s a long process. It takes years.”
Part of the challenge is political. Maria Teresa Urueña, a program manager with the nonpartisan Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas, told me that Bolufé faces an Ecuador that is less tolerant of people like him — regardless of the diplomatic deals that make these third-country removals possible.
“The deportation machine has become more sophisticated … and what protection can Ecuador really provide these asylees? Ecuador is not a safe place,” she said, noting that even she canceled a trip to Guayaquil in April due to security concerns.
Mobile Pathways, a tech nonprofit that monitors third-country expulsions and tracks court data, counted 1,836 Cubans who have been deported to Ecuador since the start of the second Trump administration. According to the Ecuadorian government, 94 of them have arrived in Ecuador seeking asylum in 2026 so far.
But there’s a flood on the horizon. According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a joint project between two humanitarian organizations, the U.S. immigration system in just the six months between December and June has put 18,552 people who aren’t from Ecuador on track for a forced deportation there. Among them are thousands of Venezuelans, Cubans, Guatemalans — and even a few from Burkina Faso, a West African nation that has become a battleground for Islamist militias.
Those who track U.S. deportation flights say they now arrive at Guayaquil airport three times a week on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays.
* * *
During my layover in Miami on the way to Ecuador, I was reminded of the alternate reality on display in conservative Little Havana. The old Cuban-American guard hanging out at outdoor coffee shops still have MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks. The fear of mistreatment and expulsion is only real for recent newcomers like Jose Reina, who fled Cuba and trekked across most of Central America with the help of a $5,000 human trafficking coyote. He managed to get legal status at the tail end of the Biden administration and now works at a hotel in South Florida.
“Those people that defend Trump are blind — no different than the communists I knew on the island,” he said. “One has to think for themselves.”
That’s not a parallel you hear often in Cuban-American circles, where politics have been dominated by Republican Party identity for decades. But it’s different for those at the receiving end of the Trump administration’s deportation apparatus.
Sitting on a lawn chair on a hill overlooking the dark waters of the Guayas River, Bolufé admitted that he admired Trump’s nostalgic vision of America and cheered him on — until he saw what ICE agents and private contractor prison guards were willing to do to detainees like him.
“You might think I’m crazy, and maybe I am. But I learned a lot being stuck in those ICE prisons, watching people suffering mental problems — the way due process and the Constitution is violated, the way people violate basic human rights, the way DHS and ICE lie unscrupulously,” he said.
Then he offered up something unexpected: Despite the chains and cold rooms and moldy shower stalls, he would have preferred to remain in ICE detention than get sent to Ecuador. At least it was a labyrinth he had learned to navigate.
That traumatic past was starting to fade into the background. All the jail transfers and quarrels with guards were blurring together, Bolufé said, and he’d rather look forward than wrestle memories. My days with him in Guayaquil had jolted his inner drive, long suppressed from “everything that happened.” He pulled up his phone and tapped the screen. He began recording a voice note asking a reggaeton agent if his client would be interested in booking a show. When his cigarettes ran out, he treated himself to my pack and pulled out another. He turned his back to the river and called a buddy in Miami who asked what he was doing next.
He had big plans. He was headed to Mexico, he said — although he was unsure how he’d travel there. Or maybe Spain, where he’d claim some sort of asylum. Or maybe Egypt, to embrace his new faith, although he didn’t know a lick of Arabic. Well, he knew one word.
“Inshallah,” he said, with a wave of his left hand.
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