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'Like we were dogs'
For Scull Delgado, life in the US began with the famous Mariel boatlift, a 1980 exodus that saw some 125,000 Cubans pile onto small, rickety boats and sail across the Florida Strait.
Many were fleeing political persecution. Others had grown desperate as a result of the island's economic strife. Scull Delgado said he joined the boatlift to escape service in Cuba's army.
But even though the "marielitos" arrived in the US without formal paperwork, Washington agreed to accept them. The US, after all, had long opposed the island's communist leadership.
"We will continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from communist domination and from economic deprivation," US President Jimmy Carter said at the time.
Over the following decades, Scull Delgado settled in California and got married to a US citizen. He had three children and four grandchildren. But he also got a criminal record.
"I committed a crime in the '90s," he said, describing it as "a slip-up" for which he did time in prison.
"After I got out, I didn’t get into any more problems," Scull Delgado added. He just had to "show up every year to sign in" at US immigration offices. "That’s where they picked me up."
Immigration agents arrested him while he was signing in at the office. After nearly 46 years in the US, he was one month away from retirement — one month away from enjoying "the benefits I earned through my work".
"I do feel betrayed by Trump because he took everything away from me after I’d spent my whole life in that country," Scull Delgado said.
By November, he had been transported to Mexico, away from his home and his family.
From left: Lazaro Diaz Garcia, Seul Delgado, Ricardo Scull Delgado and Ernesto Perez Chapman, four Cuban men deported from the US, say they are stuck in legal limbo in Palenque, Mexico [Ann Deslandes/Al Jazeera]Another Cuban national, 48-year-old Orlando Martinez Mendoza, was also deported in 2025.
He migrated from Cuba to the US in 2015, arriving by boat. But he said immigration authorities grabbed him at a court hearing in Tennessee, where he had appeared for a speeding charge.
He described being transported to three different detention centres over the course of two months in Tennessee. He was then transported out of state, to a holding facility set up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola.
Martinez Mendoza remembers the transfer being staged for media purposes.
"They selected a group of us migrants, saying we were the biggest criminals in the country," he said. "They took us to Angola prison in a bus with police in front and back, stopping traffic with sirens, and TV cameras rolling."
Eventually, he too was sent to Arizona and, from there, to Palenque. He said his bus came to a stop right in front of the offices for the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, or COMAR.
Immigration officials, he said, "dumped us right in front of COMAR like we were dogs".
The US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees federal immigration enforcement, did not reply to a request for comment for this story.
It has, however, featured Martinez Mendoza on a website of its immigration-related arrests, highlighting his conviction for selling cocaine in 2018. He was subject to a deportation order after serving two years in prison.
