
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.