Florida Keys migrant landings pick up again, along with a mystery: a boat with no people

A quiet two days along the South Florida coast gave local, state and federal law enforcement some hope that maritime migration from Cuba to South Florida might be slowing.

On Sunday, only two landings were reported. On Monday, none. But on Tuesday, several migrant boats arrived up and down the Florida Keys.

One sailboat, with EEUU — the Spanish abbreviation for the United States of America — painted on the front of its hull, was found adrift with no one on board near Rodriguez Key in Key Largo. Officer Jason Rafter with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission towed it to a small state park where several other boats from last week’s mass migrant landings are located in the mangroves.

One of Rafter’s tasks with Fish and Wildlife is documenting derelict boats for removal, a job that got much more difficult with the near-constant migrant arrivals since Christmas. The reason he towed the steel-hulled, makeshift sailboat Tuesday is so it wouldn’t become a hazard to navigation, and so people wouldn’t keep reporting seeing it.

“We’d keep getting the same calls for one boat,” he said as he stood behind the console of his patrol boat.

But there’s a mystery: Where did the people on it go?

Rafter said he suspects the boat made it to shore, the people got off, and the vessel floated back into the ocean.

The FWC is one of several departments with a new, temporary mission after Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Friday calling out the National Guard and other state agencies to help patrol Florida Keys waters for incoming migrant arrivals.

Evidence of the order was apparent Sunday morning when six Florida Highway Patrol troopers responded to a single migrant landing in Key Largo. One of the troopers said he was on temporary assignment in the Keys under the executive order. On any given day, there are only a handful of troopers assigned to the Keys to patrol the busy 120-plus miles of U.S. 1.

Personnel from other agencies including the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were spotted in the Keys on Tuesday. They said they were also there to help with the migrant situation. One FDLE agent pointed to a fixed-wing airplane circling above and said it was an FDLE aircraft patrolling for migrant boats.

There were at least two other migrant landings Tuesday. One, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, was a group of 15 to 20 people who arrived around 9 a.m. in the small Middle Keys city of Key Colony Beach. Sheriff’s office dispatch records show another arrival in Key West, but details of that landing were not immediately known.

Adam Hoffner, division chief with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Miami operations, said there were reports of a possible arrival in the Marquesas, a group of uninhabited islands about 20 miles west of Key West.

Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard reported it returned 187 people to Cuba who were stopped at sea off the Keys last week. Since Oct. 1, the beginning of the fiscal year, the agency said it has intercepted 4,915 Cubans along the Florida Straits.

Miami Herald staff writer Syra Ortiz-Blanes contributed to this report.