Tampa woman deported to Cuba gets separated from one-year-old and U.S. citizen husband

A Cuban woman living in Tampa who came to the United States in 2019 and is married to a U.S. citizen was abruptly detained by immigration authorities and deported to Cuba on Thursday, leaving behind her one-year-old child.

Heidy Sánchez, 44, a Hillsborough County resident, was among 82 Cuban migrants sent on a plane from Miami back to Cuba on Thursday morning, her husband, Carlos Yuniel Valle, told the Miami Herald. Her deportation has been so sudden and traumatic for their infant daughter, still breastfeeding and with ongoing health issues, that her grandmother was taking her to the hospital, he said in a phone interview on Friday.

“The baby is distressed and does not want to eat,” Valle said. “Imagine, they ripped the child from her mother’s arms at the immigration office; the cries of that woman in there could be heard back in Cuba,” he said, speaking of his wife’s desperation at being separated from her daughter.

Sánchez was still wearing clothing from the detention center when her husband saw her on a video call on Thursday from where she is staying in Havana. Her abrupt return to the island is coming at a time Cubans are dealing with severe shortages of food and necessities and electrical blackouts that may extend for several days. And she doesn’t have a home there.

“I am here at the store trying to buy things so that I can send her a package with toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, sanitary pads and clothes,” her husband said.

Their family separation nightmare started Tuesday when Sánchez was detained at her check-in appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Tampa office. With tears in his eyes and holding their daughter, Valle pleaded for help to stop the deportation of his wife in a video he published on Facebook the following day. Last-minute efforts by Sánchez’s lawyer and Tampa U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor to prevent her imminent deportation were unsuccessful, he said.

“They did everything possible to remove her,” her lawyer, Miami-based attorney Claudia Cañizares, said, including not disclosing where her client was being held. She said ICE agents knew Sánchez had a one-year-old daughter because the baby had come to the appointment with her.

Cañizares. said that in the less than 72 hours between Sánchez’s detention and her deportation to the island she and her staff started a frantic efforts to try to contact her and apply for a stay of removal, an order that would have temporarily prevented the Department of Homeland Security from deporting Sánchez on humanitarian grounds.