“We shot down the small planes — so what?” said the Cuban Roberto García Cabrejas following the recent federal indictment of Raúl Castro. The small planes he referred to so brazenly were those belonging to the humanitarian organization Brothers to the Rescue — aircraft that were destroyed by Castroist fighter jets in international waters in 1996, resulting in the massacre of four exiles, three of whom were American citizens.

García Cabrejas does not live in socialist Cuba — the very regime he endorses in social media posts like the one mentioned above, shared with his 14,000 followers. No. He reportedly lives in Sacramento, California; he holds legal residency in the United States, and he has dedicated himself to openly defending the regime and its crimes on pages such as H20 Invicto Cubano.

But if he loves Castroism so much, why isn’t he on the island?

According to him, he does not return there — despite being a communist — because being in the United States constitutes his “trench,” and because “every revolutionary must defend their Revolution from any latitude.” In other words, he admits to acting as an agent of influence for an adversary of Washington — an adversary that the Trump administration has officially designated an “extraordinary threat.”

I know of real, firsthand cases of individuals persecuted by the socialist tyranny whose immigration regularization processes remain frozen. When confronted with people like García Cabrejas, I ask myself: How on earth does someone who clearly does not fit the definition of a “refugee” manage to benefit from laws designed to shelter victims? It is a slap in the face to the generosity of the United States and to those of us who have truly suffered political persecution.

García Cabrejas — who claims to have arrived in the United States in 2005 — boasts about attacking “the worms” (the derogatory term Havana uses for those who oppose it); and he readily admits to being “on the same ideological side” as other well-known pro-Castro agents in Miami. And he claims to have participated in dissident groups in Cuba — as a spy?

In 2019, an online petition on the Change.org platform, garnering more than 15,000 signatures, demanded the revocation of his Permanent Residency status, arguing that he “lied on his immigration application to obtain immigration benefits (...) which is considered fraud.”

Forms such as the I-485 include questions asking whether an applicant seeking an adjustment of immigration status has, in any way, been a member of the Communist Party; whether they have directly or indirectly persecuted any person on account of their race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion; or whether they have been a member of, served in, assisted, or otherwise participated in repressive groups.

Providing a false answer would expose the applicant to federal criminal charges.

This avenue has proven useful for the criminal prosecution of individuals such as Adys Lastres Morera.

In May, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced her arrest in Miami. She is the sister of Ania Lastres Morera, executive president of the Business Administration Group S.A. (GAESA, in Spanish) — the military-run business conglomerate that controls a significant portion of the Cuban economy that a team the I led investigated for the first time in the independent press in 2018.

A press release emphasized that Lastres Morera “is responsible for managing the illicit assets that GAESA maintains abroad. The organization’s revenues — which amount to more than three times the Cuban government’s entire budget and benefit only the corrupt elites — were diverted into hidden offshore bank accounts, while ordinary Cubans continued to suffer under the country’s communist regime.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, commenting on the arrest, asserted that the woman “was managing real estate assets and living in Florida, while also aiding Havana’s communist regime.” The secretary stated that, as a result of these actions, her permanent resident status had been revoked.

If there is indeed the will, then we hope people like Anabel Campos de Castro — who played a part in the separation of a Christian family in the city of Guantánamo solely for practicing homeschooling — will also be brought to justice.

The same applies to the dozens of names on the list of repressors who have abused the U.S. immigration system by feigning the suffering of others — a suffering that is not theirs to claim, and which serves only to outrage the actual victims.