25 migrants from Cuba come ashore on Key Biscayne. One hospitalized for dehydration
Twenty-five migrants from Cuba came ashore on Key Biscayne early Tuesday, the U.S. Border Patrol said.
TV news showed a group of people sitting on the ground near the Crandon Park Marina, 4000 Crandon Blvd. Miami-Dade police, Key Biscayne police and U.S. Border Patrol vehicles were there.
U.S. Border Patrol agents took the migrants into custody.
The group consisted of 17 men, six women and two accompanied children, said Adam Hoffner, division chief for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Miami operations. Medics took one of the women to a local hospital to be treated for dehydration, Hoffner said.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Hoffner said Border Patrol agents had not found the vessel on which the migrants arrived.
“This event remains under investigation,” he said in an email.
The landing came two days after 25 people from Cuba landed in two separate incidents in the Florida Keys. Nine migrants came ashore in the Marquesas Keys, an uninhabited island group about 20 miles west of Key West Sunday morning.
Later in the day, 16 people arrived offshore of Grassy Key in a Cuban fishing vessel with the name “Monica” written on its hull, according to the Border Patrol.
Since October, the U.S. Coast Guard has stopped at sea over 3,000 Florida-bound Cuban migrants fleeing deteriorating economic, safety and political conditions on the island. That’s more than in the last five fiscal years combined, according to the agency.
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More than 140,000 Cubans have been detained at U.S. borders between October and May, surpassing the Mariel exodus of 1980 when 125,000 Cubans departed from the Port of Mariel near Havana between April and October of that year.
No other information was immediately available.
Miami Herald staff writer Omar Rodriguez Ortiz contributed to this report.
