CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The number 7,148 had become an obsession in Miguel Leyva’s life.

It represented everything the 47-year-old Cuban had lost and what he hoped to gain, and it governed his existence for more than five weeks. Along with hundreds of migrants from the Communist island nation, he gathered twice a day outside a Mexican government building on the banks of the Rio Grande, downtown El Paso shimmering in the sun not half a mile away, hoping a bureaucrat would call his number. It designated his turn on a Mexican-run waiting list, indicating how long he had until he could ask U.S. border officials in El Paso for asylum.

On his 37th day in Juárez, Leyva prayed it was finally up.

President Donald Trump has disrupted daily life here with threats to close the border, snarling traffic and trade, amid a record influx of Central American families seeking asylum. He has denigrated the U.S. asylum system as a “con job.” And his administration has curtailed access to the protection, even returning Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court dates under a policy shift being fought in federal court.

But on asylum seekers from Cuba, Trump has sent nary a Tweet, even as Mexican officials say about 2,800 from the island wait in Juárez, making up almost 80 percent of migrants in this border city and straining shelters to capacity.

The crush of Cubans there has intensified in the past few months, even as Guatemalan and Honduran families are driving the larger migrant influx across the southern border. Cubans in Juárez say they are spurred by inconsistent federal deterrent policies, which have escalated fears their pathway into the United States will shutter, and by the island’s deteriorating economy amid worsening relations with Washington.

The Trump administration’s announcement Wednesday of harsh new sanctions on Cuba, including limiting remittances and allowing exiles to sue for property seized decades ago, are certain to further roil the economy and hasten the flow of Cubans coming to the United States.

But unlike previous years, when Cubans were quickly processed at the border and allowed through, they have found a bottleneck. Starting last summer, the Trump administration slashed the number of asylum seekers allowed in at ports of entry across the border; one day last week in Juárez, officials permitted only five. That has led to mounting gridlock and tension.

“We’re trying to cope,” said Enrique Valenzuela, director of Mexico’s state population council in Chihuahua, which is coordinating migration issues here. “But the longer people wait the more desperate they become.”

Unique protection ends

For decades, Cubans enjoyed a unique protection under a Cold War policy known as “wet foot, dry foot” that granted them a fast-track U.S. green card once they reached American soil. President Barack Obama ended that privilege in 2017 when he restored diplomatic relations with the island, and the number of Cubans coming to the U.S. southern border fell 60 percent to about 15,400 that year.

Now, along with Cuba’s escalating difficulties, the U.S. has tightened many ways for Cubans to come here.

The U.S. embassy in Havana has frozen its processing of most visas after restricting operations 18 months ago following a spate of mysterious illnesses suffered by consular officials. It is doing so instead from its embassy in Guyana, but Cubans, who earn on average $30 a month, must travel there for the process. The number of visas issued has plunged, with the U.S. at risk of violating a 1994 accord to admit 20,000 Cubans seeking to emigrate here a year. A Cuban family reunification program with 20,000 applications pending has also been stalled.

Meanwhile, the throng crowding the Texas border is growing.

Six months into the fiscal year that began in October, nearly 8,400 Cubans have been deemed “inadmissible” at U.S. ports of entry — a category usually indicating that they were permitted in to seek asylum — on track to more than double the number from 2018. More Cubans are now crossing illegally between ports of entry, too.

For the first time, Cubans are in the top three nationalities making “credible fear” claims, the first step in requesting asylum at the border. They made up 14 percent of such claims in December 2018, surpassing Salvadorans to join Guatemalans and Hondurans as the greatest requesters of the protection, according to an analysis of federal data by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

In El Paso, the number of Cubans seeking to enter skyrocketed 870 percent to more than 3,800 in the last six months, compared to 394 for fiscal year 2018.

“We are full of Cubans,” said Juárez Mayor Armando Cabada, warning that his city is struggling to house that population along with hundreds of Central America families. “In a few more weeks, we won’t have any more space.”

Passage through Panama

Like most Cubans who make it to the United States, Leyva said he has been dreaming of achieving this goal for as long as he can remember. But it was never a possibility because he doesn’t have family in the U.S. and couldn’t earn enough in Cuba, where he owned a small cell phone company, to afford the travel through Latin America.

Many Cubans seeking to come to the U.S. flew first to Guyana, one of the few countries where they don’t need a visa, before making the treacherous journey north. But last year Panama began offering Cubans a tourist card for $20, making it far cheaper and less risky to come to the United States.

Leyva said he and his son decided to leave his hometown of Gibara, a fishing village on the island’s southeast, in December. He said police beat and threatened to imprison him for protesting the Communist Party in the street. The island has also struggled for months with worsening food shortages, a result in part of the deepening crisis in Venezuela, which supplied Cuba’s energy in exchange for its physicians serving there.

“There’s no food in the shops,” Leyva said. “It forces one to kill pigs and wait.”

A Cuban friend in Miami loaned him $10,000 to fly to Panama and cross through Mexico. Leyva said Cubans are streaming here now, worried that Trump’s rage at Central American migrants will imperil their path in the run-up to the 2020 elections. In March, Nicaragua approved a $50 tourist visa for Cubans, making the journey to the U.S. even shorter in a move experts say is sure to heighten the flow.

For years Cubans entered the southern border largely at Laredo, their most direct connection. But starting last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers began permitting only about a handful of asylum seekers through a day at that international bridge in a practice known as “metering.” Cubans shifted their destination to El Paso, where at least a few dozen were allowed in daily, though in the last week that has plummeted to the single digits.

“Cubans are very well connected and very united,” Leyva said. “They talk on Facebook and Whatsapp and everyone was telling us to come to El Paso.”

New reality for Cubans

In Juárez, Leyva found thousands of Cubans scrambling to get on a waiting list to request asylum at the port of entry. In March, the State Population Council for Chihuahua took over the waiting list, replacing a chaotic paper system with spreadsheets and photos confirming asylum seekers’ identity.

But because of metering, most migrants wait almost two months before their turn arises. That lag has crowded shelters and hotels in Juárez, inflaming tensions among migrants, many whom have run out of money by the time they reach the border.

The congestion has underlined a new reality: Cubans no longer enjoy the same benefits they once did in the U.S. immigration system. But they’re still better off than their Guatemalan and Honduran cohorts, some of whom are being returned to wait for their asylum hearings in Mexico.

Valenzuela, the Mexican migration official, recently addressed Cuban and Central American migrants in a Methodist church where more than 150 slept head-to-toe in the pews. The Cubans were waiting to request asylum, with many saying they were ultimately coming to Houston, an increasingly favored Cuban destination in the past few years. The Central Americans had been returned to Mexico while their U.S. asylum cases progressed.

“Cubans are in a bit of a different situation than our friends from Central America and it’s unfortunate, but the only thing you can do is wait,” Valenzuela said. “This is a situation that depends on politics in the U.S.”

He advised them not to cross the Rio Grande, warning that it could lead to criminal charges that might make asylum difficult. Before, Cubans, knowing they stood a higher chance if they claimed political persecution, did not cross illegally. But frustrated at the long waits, Valenzuela said more are doing so now.

“We were born in different places but we all have our dreams,” said Valenzuela, attempting to inject some hope into the glum crowd. “Wait for now. At least here you have a roof over your head.”

‘We have really suffered’

The morning light had barely begun to stream into room 14 in Hotel Armar, but Leyva was already zipping shut his bag for what he hoped would be the last time on Mexican soil. To cut down on expenses for his unexpected long-term stay in Mexico, he had shared one bed with his son and a family friend while a Cuban couple slept in the other.

Their belongings were scattered across the room, including bright blue high heels that 35-year-old Lidia Avalle had brought with her on the months-long journey from Guyana to Brazil, up through Ecuador and the Panamanian jungle, to Central America and across Mexico.

“We have really suffered,” she said from the neighboring bed.

She hoped U.S. officials would call her number —7,535 —in two weeks and then she planned to go to Jacksonville, Fla., where she knows someone. The psychologist said Cuban police killed her uncle, shot her dad in the leg, and have threatened her since university because of her activism.

“For 60 years the Castros have cheated us and we can’t put up with it anymore,” she said.

But while the American dream was once a certainty for Cubans arriving at its shores, it now is anything but. More than 200 were returned to the island in 2017 after Obama ended their special status, four times as many as in 2015, according to government data, and their deportations have since surged.

So far this fiscal year, nearly 3,700 Cubans have had deportation proceedings filed in U.S. immigration courts, though that pales in comparison with the approximately 21,300 Guatemalans and 15,600 Hondurans facing such measures, according to federal data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Those Central Americans migrants are coming in far greater numbers, but Cubans also face another significant advantage.

If immigration officials release them on a status known as parole, rather than detain them until deciding whether or not to set a bond, they can apply for a green card after a year and a day in the U.S. under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. That’s a key privilege held by no other nationalities, whose migrants can only hope to win a long shot at asylum in immigration court.

Still, the Trump administration’s chaotic immigration policies have extended to Cubans, said Wilfredo Allen, a Miami immigration attorney. He has represented members of the same family released on different outcomes, depending on whether or where they were detained.

In one case, a 19-year-old man was freed on parole, meaning he would be able to adjust his status in a year under the act. But his mother and sister were held in a detention center, then released on their own recognizance, so they are not eligible and must fight for asylum in court. Another Cuban was released on parole but his wife, sent to an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania, was deported.

“It’s crazy,” Allen said.

He has also seen an uptick in Cubans coming in on tourist visas, then overstaying. The U.S. government has cut how long Cubans can be here on such visas and Allen said more are remaining illegally, then filing for a green card after a year, per the act.

“You’re going to see more Cubans coming in like that,” said Allen, who blamed the Cuban influx on the administration. “The crisis of Cubans at the border is created by the current policies of the U.S.”

Leyva knew that widely different outcomes were a possibility for him, his son, and their friend.

Won’t go back to Cuba

“There’s a little bit of luck with this,” he said as they walked out of the Juárez hotel. “They say it depends a lot on the person who interviews you.”

Even if he was ordered deported, Leyva said he would not return to Cuba. He pointed at photographs of his wife and grandchildren in his wallet . He hoped to earn enough to pay for their journey eventually.

Nerves set in as he reached the Mexican government building. The crowd had gathered for the calling of the numbers and Leyva’s group strained to hear.

“7,148; 7,149; 7,150,” the bureaucrat said, eliciting cheers.

Mexican humanitarian officials escorted Leyva’s trio and two dozen other Cubans across the international bridge to its midpoint, where U.S. officials now turn back nearly all asylum seekers, telling them to get on the Mexican waiting list. The Cubans passed an outdoor tent structure abutting the bridge on the U.S. side that was crowded with Central American migrants who had crossed the river. Some would be released to make their asylum cases in the U.S., while others would be returned to Juárez to await their proceedings. In the past three weeks, Mexican officials said about 400 such Central American asylum seekers with U.S. immigration cases have been sent back.

In three days, Leyva had made it through U.S. processing and was at the El Paso airport, along with the family friend. His son was still detained; Leyva hoped immigration officials would release him soon.

“I’ve achieved my dream,” Leyva said. “But it’s still missing my son.”

lomi.kriel@chron.com