A Florida Immigration Fight Divides Cubans Who Arrived as Children

MIAMI — The state was threatening the Roman Catholic Church’s ability to shelter immigrant children when Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami went for South Florida’s emotional jugular: He compared the unaccompanied children who were crossing the border today to those who fled Communist Cuba six decades ago without their parents.

Offended by the comparison, angry Cuban Americans called Spanish-language radio. They wrote letters to the editor. A discussion at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora to denounce the archbishop’s comments turned emotional. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who had directed his administration to stop renewing shelter licenses, called the comparison to Cuban exiles who had arrived legally “disgusting.”

Archbishop Wenski and his backers, including a different group of Cuban Americans, pressed on. A news conference to accuse the governor of politicking when children’s lives were at stake. An appearance by an unaccompanied Honduran boy who had been recently reunited with his parents in the United States. And, in the weeks since, an onslaught of radio ads blasting the governor as uncaring.

Even in Miami’s knockabout politics, the scrap has been striking, exposing a deep divide among the former children of Operation Pedro Pan, the secret program run by the Catholic Church with help from the State Department that resettled some 14,000 young Cubans after the island’s 1959 revolution. In the past, the program’s beneficiaries, known as Pedro Pans, had largely avoided making internal rifts so public. But for some Pedro Pans today, either Archbishop Wenski’s comparison went too far — or Mr. DeSantis’s policy did.

banned so-called sanctuary cities and counties, though most analysts agreed that Florida did not have any to begin with. Last year, a federal judge struck down parts of the law, calling it racially motivated. The state has appealed.

Last week, lawmakers sent Mr. DeSantis a bill he has championed that would prohibit state and local agencies from doing business with companies that work as federal contractors transporting immigrants who crossed the border illegally. The state has not identified any such companies, Politico reported.

were released to Florida sponsors — shelters, foster families and relatives — between October 2020 and September 2021, and more than 4,000 from October 2021 to January 2022, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

told the shelters that they do not need a state license to continue operating. But the state’s proposed new rule requires that a resettlement agreement between the state and federal governments be in place before the shelters can accept additional children.

The governor’s directive prompted Archbishop Wenski — an outspoken figure with a penchant for cigars and motorcycles and a revving engine for a cellphone ringtone — to write an opinion essay in January denouncing the possibility that the church’s Cutler Bay shelter could lose its license. It houses about 50 children now, under Covid-19 protocols, and is one of more than a dozen such shelters in the state, though the only one run by the Catholic Church.

The archbishop, a son of Polish immigrants, is familiar with Miami’s ethnic and racial divisions. For 18 years, he was the parish priest for predominantly Haitian churches, delivering Mass in Creole.

“I was involved with the Haitians when they were showing up by boat at the same time the Cubans were showing up,” he recalled in an interview.

Cubans were considered political refugees, and Haitians economic ones. “But if you interviewed either one, Cuban or Haitian, they would say, ‘I want to work’ or ‘I don’t have a future in my home country,’” he said.

Today’s unaccompanied minors did not get more than a passing mention when Archbishop Wenski and several bishops met with Mr. DeSantis in early February, the archbishop said. The previous evening, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, who are Catholic, had attended the archbishop’s Red Mass of the Holy Spirit in Tallahassee.