Katrina Castro versus ICE: US accuses a former Cuban judge of being communist

At 1.30 p.m. on Sunday in South Florida, the Broward Transition Center front desk officer will ask visitors to leave all their belongings, except for keys, in the waiting room lockers. About 20 people are grouped together — women who drove several miles, men on their day off, bored and impatient children. All are asked to pass through a scanner so they can access the interior of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enclave, which has a capacity for about 700 detainees.

When another officer opens the door to the facility’s dining room, each visitor will look for their relative, locate them, and embrace them as if their lives depended on it. Katrina Castro-Menéndez is the only one who remains seated. She looks like the schoolgirl her parents have forgotten to pick up.

“Katrina?” the journalist asks from a distance. Katrina, 41, stands. She has dark skin and old, noble eyes, a gray uniform and a rosary that hangs from her neck. She is the former Cuban judge who was detained by ICE officers last June outside her home in Cooper City. She bursts into tears. This is the first time Katrina has received a visit in detention. Neither her husband, Deyni Rojas González, nor her 15-year-old daughter can go to the Broward center. The authorities do not allow her husband in because he does not have either residency or citizenship. Neither have they been able to see Katrina for several days through the usual authorized video calls available to detainees as her husband’s ID as a beneficiary of a humanitarian parole program in the United States has expired.

The dining room is filled with people and voices. Guards talk around one of the tables; there is a man who goes every Sunday to see his ex-partner, Adys Lastres Morera, whom ICE arrested for being the sister of Ania Guillermina Lastres Morena, the executive president of the Cuban military conglomerate GAESA, the consortium in the crosshairs of Donald Trump’s administration, which controls 40% of the Cuban economy. They sit across from each other catching up. Alina Rosales Aguirreurreta, the daughter of Cuban General Ulises Rosales del Toro, was also detained in the Broward center.

Driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the U.S. government intends to target not only Cuban institutions that allegedly pose a threat to U.S. national security, but also people or family members who have links with institutions such as the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. After the last sanctioned entities were announced in recent months, Rubio said anyone “providing services to these sanctioned actors is at risk of being sanctioned themselves.” Although the warning is mostly aimed at entities or individuals with economic ties to Castroism, ICE has lately been targeting relatives of Cuban ministers, officials or senior public officials in the U.S.

Katrina, however, was not born into Cuba’s elite, but rather into a modest family in the province of Matanzas. She wanted to get out of there and study and she finally got to do so at the University of Havana where she read law and graduated as a lawyer. She was then sent to the court in Cárdenas as part of her social service to the country. She became a judge and in that position she earned 190 pesos a month (around $7). “That’s why no one wanted to work there, because that was the salary,” she says.

She then worked at the Municipal Court of Central Havana. “They were simple cases. My sentencing framework was between three months and a year. It was generally fines. There were no important cases. It was the man who stole the bicycle on the corner, or the one who stole the fruit from a shop,” she explains.

But now the Trump administration claims that Katrina cannot be in the U.S. for several reasons: one, for having tried to obtain immigration benefits through fraud or willful misrepresentation. Another, because she is a judge, and if she is a judge, she has to be a member or affiliate of the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, according to the authorities. In this case, the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC).

Now it’s Katrina’s word against that of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The federal agency insists that Katrina said she was not a member of a Communist Party. However, according to documents consulted by EL PAÍS, the authorities insist that her work as a judge in the Cuban judicial system implies an affiliation or association with the Communist Party that should have been revealed.

Katrina stresses she never belonged to the party. Although the PCC’s statutes admit people over 18 years of age, it is exceptional. Most enter after the age of 30. Katrina was only 23 when she became a judge. “The prosecutor will never be able to prove that I was [a member], just as I cannot prove that I was not. They also say that as a judge I would have to have belonged to the party, and that’s not the case. That is an inconsistency,” she says. EL PAÍS confirmed with at least three other judges that belonging to the PCC is certainly not a mandatory requirement to occupy the position of judge in the Cuban justice system.

During the visit, Katrina looks out a window. She stops for a few minutes to think, then says, “I know that I will never set foot out there again.” It’s not a complaint, just a truth. She is a lawyer. She is convinced that probably nothing she says will convince the prosecutor or the judge who is hearing her case.

The unexpected arrest

Katrina left her position as a judge in 2014 and began working as a lawyer at the Bufete Colectivo de Centro Habana. In 2019, she got a student visa to study a master’s degree in human rights at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí in Mexico where she had been told that practicing the profession “was going to be complicated,” but she did not want to return to Cuba. She began working with human rights organizations, especially the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL) foundation, which has been accused of promoting the fall of Castroism. This meant she would not be able to work again in Cuba, even if she wanted to.

When she was about to start her doctorate, Katrina decided to go to the U.S. where she planned to work as a lawyer. To do so, she needed to revalidate her university degrees. On August 13, 2021, she presented herself at a border point in Arizona, and was released with an I-220A status, the same one that has recently kept more than 500,000 Cubans in legal limbo.

While she had no legal documents, Katrina lived a peaceful existence in the U.S. Her daughter went to school, Katrina working as a cleaner and her husband as a gardener. On June 12, her husband left the house at about 6 a.m. Two hours later, while her daughter was sleeping, Katrina got into her 2017 Chevrolet Trax and saw a black Cadillac parked behind her. She remembers thinking it was badly parked. She started her car but another vehicle cornered her. “I thought they were going to ask me about a neighbor. I had no idea. So I rolled down the window and they said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Katrina.’”

Six officers approached her. While one twisted her arm, another told her: “Katrina, you have been detained by immigration, you have to get out of the car.” She began to cry. “My daughter, my daughter is in the house,” she said. “Yes,” they replied. “We know that your husband left earlier and that your daughter is at home sleeping. Your husband is going to come back and take care of your daughter, but now you are coming with us.”

After a while, her husband received a call. “I was working when an unknown number called me,” he said. It was Katrina. “She told me: ‘Deyni, it’s me, they arrested me.’” She was taken to the ICE offices in Miramar, and then to Broward.

The authorities wake the detainees at Broward at 6 a.m. to clean. Twice a day they let them go out to the yard to see the sun and touch the artificial grass, do a little exercise or play volleyball. They also have a room with board games. While the facility has come under fire for its lack of medical care, especially after the death of Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian migrant who suffered from blood pressure problems, Katrina says she prefers it to other detention centers.

“It’s very difficult to be here without knowing what’s going to happen. You can be moved at night to another place — a place much worse than this which takes me away from my family. The fact that my daughter is half an hour away gives me strength,” she says. Her favorite time is when she can visit the chapel to pray, something she had never done before. “I feel so at peace when I walk in there, so calm,” she says.

During the conversations she had with EL PAÍS last week, Katrina was particularly nervous as she would soon have her first hearing with the judge. Up to then, she had only had meetings with the prosecutor that didn’t bode well. She knows that every defendant should be heard. But “they don’t want to listen to you. You are guilty and proving otherwise is going to be difficult. They are assuming that I made the mistakes intentionally. No one will ever believe in your innocence,” she says.

Katrina will have to explain several inconsistencies in her immigration process. The first time she signed a Form I-589, an Application for Asylum and Withholding of Removal, it was not she who made the application, but a law firm which asked not to be named. The lawyers asked her to tell them why she believed she was an asylum seeker, but they were the ones who filled out the information on the application, for which they charged $3,000. “I saved that by cleaning floors and not buying anything for my daughter,” Katrina says.

In the application, the lawyers stated that the former judge had not been a member of any political organization or group. However, when another attorney later filed Form I-485, or Application to Register Permanent Residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act, Katrina answered a series of questions that didn’t align with her previous answers. When asked if she had ever been a member, participated or been associated in any way with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society or similar group in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, including any military service, Katrina answered yes. She said she had belonged to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the organization sanctioned by Marco Rubio, and to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC).

Katrina had told the truth, but it wouldn’t go in her favor. The CDRs are a mass organization created in Cuba in 1960 with the aim of guaranteeing surveillance in the neighborhoods. All Cuban citizens automatically become part of them after the age of 14. The FMC includes all women over that age. There is no question of not belonging, it is simply part of the ordinary life of Cubans within a totalitarian system. For decades, joining this type of organization is a prerequisite to getting a house, a car, a television or a steady job. Many people have been active in these groups, less out of conviction and more out of necessity. Generations of Cubans have belonged to these same organizations and have later received protection in the U.S.

However, when asked if she had belonged to a Communist Party, Katrina replied emphatically that she had not. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security insists this is a lie. “Under penalty of perjury, you omitted your connection with the Communist Party as a criminal judge in the Municipal People’s Court of Central Havana,” says the procedural file from the DHS.

“So you were from the Communist Party?”

On August 5, Katrina came before the judge for the first time. The judge was astonished that she didn’t have a lawyer, but Katrina said she would defend herself. The judge wanted to know if she had lied during the asylum process. “I didn’t lie, I did my process with that lawyer. He never interviewed me, he only asked me why I was applying for asylum. I never had the slightest idea that something was wrong with my process,” she said. Then the judge asked about the FMC and the CDRs. “Yes, I belonged to the CDRs, which all Cubans, men and women, belong to. I also belonged to the FMC, which all the women who live on the island belong to. And I was from the FEU (University Student Federation), because I studied at the university, like all students,” she replied.

“So you were from the Communist Party?” the judge asked again, and Katrina again said, “No, I have not been a member of the Communist Party in any country in the world.” After the session, Katrina was relieved. She had been allowed to speak, to tell her truth before the law. She still harbors hope, the possibility that tomorrow she will be allowed to go home. But most of the time she thinks her definitive departure from the U.S. is imminent. Preparing for this eventuality, she thinks about what she will say to her daughter, a conversation that she has rehearsed during confinement. “How do I tell her that we are going backwards? To a country where there is no electricity three days in a row? A country where all people do is get up and breathe, because they have nothing to do? What will become of my family without me? And what am I going to do without my family?”

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