Mexican officials cite INM corruption as bigger threat than Cuban migrant arrests

In the span of two weeks, Cancún arrested twenty Cubans for public drunkenness, drug use, and street fights. The incidents drew attention, but not the kind that worried Jorge Escudero Buerba, president of the business security commission in Quintana Roo. What truly alarmed him was something operating in the shadows of Mexico's National Immigration Institute—a system where, for four to five thousand dollars, migration officials would hand deportees the paperwork to stay.

Escudero Buerba described the mechanism plainly: agents would provide temporary residency permits valid for two years, opening a path to permanent status later. The money changed hands, the documents materialized, and the process that should have taken months through official channels happened in days through unofficial ones. He insisted the Cubans arriving in Mexico came wanting to work, wanting to build better lives and send money home. But when they tried to regularize their status through proper channels, migration authorities dragged out the paperwork deliberately, he said, forcing them to desperation and into the hands of corrupt officials.

The arrests in Cancún were treated as minor infractions by local authorities. Jorge Rivero Pech, director of the civic courts there, acknowledged the disturbances but framed them as adaptation problems. The Cubans were unfamiliar with local norms, he suggested—they drank in public, used drugs openly, spoke loudly, behaved differently. After a warning and a fine, they were released. The system moved on.

But the corruption ran deeper and longer than recent weeks. In 2019, the interior secretary at the time, Olga Sánchez Cordero, admitted that Mexico's immigration institute was among the most corrupted institutions in government. She promised a cleanup. Within months, 1,040 agents resigned due to various irregularities. Yet the rot persisted. In 2023, a migration agent working at an airport spoke to journalists about the machinery of it all: supervisors would signal which migrants to wave through without questions, and at shift's end, agents received cash. Records were manipulated. Supposed human errors erased the digital trail of travelers who never should have entered. When migrants lacked legal entry requirements, supervisors simply altered procedures to authorize them anyway. This happened under the previous administration, despite public commitments to fight corruption. Denunciations against migration officials increased, but sanctions and suspensions fell.

The question of who was actually arriving became urgent in May. A Cuban singer, Wally del Valle, twenty-nine years old from Trinidad in Sancti Spíritus province, was shot dead in Phoenix, Arizona—where he had worked as security for another Cuban artist. He had arrived in the United States in 2019, faced detention, and was deported after conviction for human trafficking. Another Cuban, Yoexy, was stopped in April for speeding on a motorcycle in Cancún. When authorities checked his record, they found he was wanted in Tampa, Florida, on charges of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.

Between January 20, 2025, and March 9, 2026, the United States deported 12,977 migrants from third countries to Mexico. Of those, 4,353 were Cuban. Five hundred ninety-two of them were stranded in Quintana Roo. Escudero Buerba pressed the point: Mexico needed to examine what kind of people the United States was sending back. The Americans, he said, were deporting people who had lived there for years, people with criminal histories. They were the ones arriving damaged, already corrupted. The real problem, he insisted, was not the Cubans themselves but the system that was both pushing them out and pulling them in—a system where officials on both sides of the border had learned to profit from desperation.