My neighbor in south Florida didn't want people to know what year he had arrived from Cuba. He hoped to avoid the stigma of the 1980 Mariel boatlift. But the Miami Beach police knew better, in part because of his dark skin and prison tattoos.

Yes, he had been in prison outside Havana, first as a guard, and then -- after he was caught giving food to a hungry prisoner -- as a prisoner himself. He never committed a crime in the U.S., but the Miami Beach police harassed him relentlessly, as they did many other Mariel refugees in the neighborhood.

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Despite last week's reversals of Obama administration changes to U.S.-Cuba relations, President Trump reportedly will leave in place immigration policy changes implemented by his predecessor. One result is that Mariel Cubans in the U.S. are likely to face deportation to the country they left almost four decades ago. These deportations will happen quietly, and chances are that even observers who are sympathetic to other deportees will be made uneasy by the dubious "history" that has given anti-Mariel prejudice its long life.

Among the 125,000 Cubans who came here in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlift, there were indeed actual criminals. But Fidel Castro put Cubans in jail for political reasons and on bogus charges. A common "crime" among those who left from the port of Mariel was peligrosidad or "dangerousness." This code-word was used to justify the incarceration of people for being potentially counter-revolutionary, or gay, or otherwise "undesireable." Sometimes the "dangerousness" label simply provided cover for the police to exercise arbitrary authority.

In other words, Castro and his functionaries got rid of people they didn't want.

After an initial welcome, the U.S. government followed suit, incarcerating thousands of Mariel Cubans, often for decades, when they were not serving criminal sentences, because Castro would not take them back. In its ratonalization for mistreating these people, the United States -- under Republicans and Democrats -- has closely mirrored the Castro regime's authoritarian logic. Today the Obama-Trump policy is poised to continue following the Castro's example.

Since the beginning, discussion of Mariels has been tainted by law enforcement's preconceptions. Authorities contributed to racist portrayals of Mariel Cubans, and then they used those portrayals to justify their mistreatment of the Cubans.

Scarface, Hollywood's influential 1983 caricature -- Al Pacino's ridiculous accent was the equivalent of blackface -- opens with titles declaring that Castro sent the "dregs of his jails" here. Producer Martin Bregman's said, "We got a big assist from the U.S. Attorney's office" in Florida. Three years later, a former advisor to New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato wrote in The Justice Professional that the behavior of Mariel Cubans was "so violent and unusual that Hollywood was inspired to produce a movie entitled 'Scarface,' which portrayed the tremendously violent behavior exhibited by theses Cubans." The 'unusual' behaviors cited by law enforcement included homosexuality, prostitution, and the practice of Santería, the Afro-Caribbean religion common in Cuba. (In 1993, the Supreme Court struck down a Miami law for its religion-based discrimination against practitioners of Santería; the case was cited in February by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when it upheld the stay of Trump's executive order on travel.)

The circular logic continued to play out for decades as "unelected bureaucrats" with "far too much power" (to borrow Speaker Paul Ryan's words) would decide whether to keep Mariel Cubans imprisoned. There were no appeals. There were no judges.

Here are four examples from the thousands of victims of these policies.

--A Mariel Cuban man was given probation for attempted robbery. He also served two sentences for misdemeanor marijuana possession. Then the immigration agency kept him "administratively detained" for nineteen years.

--A Mariel Cuban man was sentenced to 90 days for misdemeanor cocaine possession. Then the immigration agency detained him for another fifteen years.

-- A Mariel Cuban man served five years for attempted murder -- and then the immigration agency detained him, too, for another fifteen years. After one of his "panel reviews," immigration officials denied him release on the basis that he showed insufficient remorse for his crime. In a subsequent review, they denied him release on the basis that his expression of remorse was merely a "tactic" to get released.

-- A Mariel Cuban woman served fourteen months for misdemeanor drug possession, and she completed a drug-treatment program in jail. Then the immigration service put her into indefinite detention. Denied her anti-depressant medication, she became suicidal and tried to swallowed razor blades. When she came up for review, the immigration agency used her suicide attempt to justify her continued imprisonment.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Clark v. Martinez to limit the "indefinite detention" of Mariel Cubans (and other "inadmissable aliens"). The majority opinion was written by Antonin Scalia.

As a result of Martinez, many Mariel Cubans were released from custody, but they have remained subject to deportation or "removal."

Back in 1984, Cuba and the U.S. agreed on a list of 2746 Mariel Cubans to be returned. "Of those," Jay Weaver of the Bradenton Herald reported in January, "2,022 have been sent back, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another 246 have died, and 478 are too old and sick to be returned."

That would seem to do away with the "list," a document infamous among immigration attorneys who often tried in vain to discover whether their Mariel clients were on it.

But according to the January joint statement between the two governments, "Cuba shall accept that individuals included in the list of 2,746 to be returned . . . may be replaced by others . . . provided that they are Cuban nationals who departed for the United States of America via the Port of Mariel in 1980." (Emphasis added.)

In other words, the Mariel Cubans remain pawns in migration diplomacy, and the Trump administration is poised to punish them yet again.

They have been victimized by the Castro regime and by successive U.S. administrations. They are not obvious candidates for a bipartisan amnesty, but after thirty-seven years here, they should be.

Mark Dow is the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California).

The views expressed by this author are their own and are not the views of The Hill.