Arrival of 300 migrants prompts closure of remote Florida national park
Dry Tortugas National Park has been closed to the public after hundreds of migrants arrived by boat at the remote islands on the tip of the Florida Keys.
The National Park Service estimated that 300 people arrived at the park over the past couple of days and said Sunday that there will be no visitor services and “extremely limited” emergency services during the closure. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard said Monday that the agency is working to remove the migrants “expeditiously” but did not provide a reopening date for the park, which includes a group of islands about 70 miles west of Key West.
The people will be transferred to federal law enforcement agents in the Keys and then processed by regional U.S. Border Patrol stations to determine their legal status, Rear Adm. Brendan C. McPherson, commander of the Coast Guard’s Seventh District, said in a statement. “Irregular, illegal maritime migration is always dangerous and often deadly. Do not take to the sea,” he said.
Although the National Park Service didn’t specify where the migrants were from, it said the Florida Keys have seen an uptick in arrivals from Cuba, which is governed by an authoritarian, one-party system and has been gripped by an economic crisis for more than a year, spurring blackouts, food shortages and soaring inflation.
Cubans trying to flee their country may travel by sea to Florida or attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Under long-standing agreements with Havana, migrants interdicted at sea by the Coast Guard are sent back to the island. Those who land on U.S. soil – including the Florida Keys – are transferred to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and generally allowed to remain in the United States to seek asylum or humanitarian refuge.
The Coast Guard sent 80 asylum seekers back to Cuba last week.
Separately, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office said more than 160 refugees reached land in the middle and upper Florida Keys over the weekend. Sheriff Rick Ramsay blamed Washington in a statement, saying the refugees’ arrival “shows a lack of a working plan by the federal government to deal with a mass migration issue that was foreseeable” and describing the development as a “humanitarian crisis.” (Ramsay was one of the sheriffs who in 2020 endorsed Donald Trump, who promised to tighten U.S. borders, for reelection.)
Lt. Cmdr. John Beal, a spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Seventh District and the Homeland Security Task Force Southeast, did not agree with the sheriff’s characterization, saying the recent influx can be attributed in part to “unseasonably good weather.”
“I cannot speak on behalf of the sheriff,” he said via text message, “but I would not say this is a crisis. Historical precedent has shown a reduction during the winter months because maritime weather gets worse and does not support the small, rustic, overloaded vessels making dangerous crossings over the FL Straits.”
Mild weather in recent days, he suggested, makes conditions more suitable to “very dangerous maritime ventures” that attempt to enter the United States by sea.
The Coast Guard interdicted 4,076 Cuban migrants in the last three months of the 2022 calendar year, according to data from the Seventh District. There were 6,182 interdictions in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, and 838 in the 2021 fiscal year.
During the first 11 months of 2022, U.S. authorities noted a record 270,000 unauthorized crossings by Cubans along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the latest government statistics.
The recent developments come as Trump-era migration policies are being contested. Last week, the Supreme Court blocked for now the Biden administration’s effort to end Title 42, which allows officials to quickly expel migrants from the United States without allowing them the opportunity to seek asylum. The court will consider the case more fully in February.
President Biden’s attempt to end the “Remain in Mexico” program, a different Trump-era policy that sends asylum seekers back to Mexico to await immigration proceedings, was thwarted by a federal judge in Texas last month.
Cubans who enter the United States along the Mexico border have generally been exempted from both of those policies. But the Biden administration is weighing measures that would expand the Title 42 returns to include some Cubans and other nationalities.
Authorities are still working to determine exactly how many migrants attempted to enter Dry Tortugas park, as well as their nationalities and cases for staying in the United States. But first, Beal said, the migrants must be moved to Key West.
“There is no infrastructure to support life where they are now (no water, food, medical resources to sustain any long term presence),” he wrote.