‘The party of the Cubans’: How Republicans courted a key South Florida vote 

But one element of the Republican platform has raised concern among Cuban Americans, according to recent polling.

Trump has championed the mass deportation of immigrants with irregular status. That has included deporting Cubans who have lived in the country for decades.

But Cuba has largely rejected the US deportation flights. As a result, Cuban deportees are often sent to third-party countries, where they have no ties.

The group Human Rights Watch estimates that the US has deported as many as 4,353 Cubans to Mexico between January 2025 and March 2026 — the largest number of any non-Mexican nationality.

That policy clashes with the desires of the Cuban American community in South Florida, according to the Miami Herald's April poll.

Roughly 68 percent disapprove of deporting Cubans. An even higher percentage favours resuming immigration processing for Cubans already in the country.

Porras’s Democratic opponent, Reysy "Rey" Sordo, is campaigning on that sentiment. A 27-year-old Miami native also born to Cuban immigrants, he opposes what he sees as heavy-handed crackdowns by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies.

“ICE has a duty to uphold and respect and treat our citizens and non-citizens with dignity,” Sordo told Al Jazeera.

Sordo, who is running unopposed in August's Democratic primary, shares the view that the island’s current government is an “oppressive and destructive regime that has led Cuba to its downfall”.

Still, he said he prefers to focus on issues at home, including Trump's mass deportation effort.

“Everybody is living under fear right now, whether it's fear of not being able to move out for young people, fear of not being able to afford a life here in Miami, fear of being deported,” Sordo said.

Stephanie Best, a volunteer with the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, believes Trump's policies on immigration could ultimately leave Cuban Americans disenchanted with the right wing.

“I think that many people are kind of starting to see that they’ve been lied to," Best said. "They thought they would not be detained; they're being detained. They thought they would not be deported; they're being deported.”

Surveys have also suggested a growing generational divide among Cuban Americans.

While a majority of Cuban Americans across all age groups identify as Republicans, younger voters, ages 18 to 39, are more likely to identify as Democrats or independent.

Sordo views such trends as evidence that Cuban American voters are "tired of partisan tribalism". South Florida's Latino electorate may be powerful, but Sordo explained that many voters still feel disenfranchised.

“We're by and large out of the conversation, whether it be by our own people who make it to office and then pull up the ladder," Sordo said, "or by folks who don't look like us and have oftentimes suppressed folks that look like us."