Cancún security leader blames deported criminals, not working migrants, for Cuban tensions

Jorge Escudero, who leads Cancún's Citizen Security Council, has drawn a sharp line in the sand. The problem roiling his city, he insists, is not the Cubans arriving by the thousands seeking work. It is the ones being sent back from the United States with criminal records in their pockets and, he alleges, enough cash to buy their way into legal status in Mexico.

The tension in Cancún has boiled over in recent weeks. On May 28, a man named Rigoberto got into a physical altercation with a Mexican neighbor over an unleashed dog bite in the Supermanzana 23 neighborhood. The confrontation was recorded. Within hours, nearly 200 people gathered outside Rigoberto's home, hurling stones and bottles. Police arrived in force—municipal officers, state police, the National Guard, riot teams. A week earlier, on May 21, a 29-year-old Cuban singer named Willy was shot nine times in the same neighborhood and left in critical condition. Four Cubans were detained as suspects. There had also been a shooting at a Cuban's vehicle on Bonampak Avenue. The incidents stacked up, each one feeding the next, each one pushing residents closer to the edge.

Escudero's distinction is deliberate. The Cubans who cross into Mexico seeking work, he said, arrive with legitimate aspirations. They come from a country where conditions are harsh, where opportunity is scarce. They want to build something. That is not the problem. The problem, he argued, is the other group—Cubans whom the United States has deported after years of residence there, people with criminal histories, people with money and no legitimate way to have earned it. These are the ones, he said, who arrive already corrupted, already dangerous.

But Escudero's real target was not the deported criminals themselves. It was the National Immigration Institute, the INM, which he accused of systematic corruption. For a bribe—four thousand, five thousand dollars—the INM would regularize almost anyone, he claimed. The institute would issue papers to people with outstanding arrest warrants in the United States. He pointed to the shooting victim as an example: a Cuban with a criminal past, now legally resident in Mexico, courtesy of what Escudero called a "very, very strong" level of institutional rot.

The numbers give weight to his concern. Between January 20, 2025, and March 9, 2026, the United States deported 4,353 Cubans to Mexico. They were the largest group of third-country nationals sent south during that period. The monthly average had jumped 42 percent since the start of the second Trump administration. Thousands of people, many with histories of crime, arriving in a city already strained by migration, already watching its neighborhoods change faster than residents could process.

On June 3, two more Cubans were arrested in connection with the viral assault. Meanwhile, Cuban residents of Mexico began demanding that their own government break its silence on the hostility they were facing. One young Cuban woman burned a Mexican flag in protest. Escudero condemned the act, though he tried to soften his words: if people were unhappy, they should go home. But he also seemed aware that he was walking a line, that anger could metastasize into something worse—a generalized hatred that would consume everyone from the island, not just the ones who had actually done harm.

He ended with a plea for proportion. There are bad apples everywhere, he said—Mexican bad apples too. The answer was not to declare war on an entire nationality. The answer was to identify who was actually creating the insecurity and deal with them, regardless of where they came from. But in a city where videos of violence spread in minutes, where crowds gather in hours, where the distinction between individual criminals and entire populations can blur into nothing, such appeals to reason often arrive too late.