Agents of the United States Border Patrol (USBP) They are investigating the landing of a possible group of migrants who arrived on the beach in Miami Beach on Sunday in a motorized boat.
The police in this town confirmed having received calls about the possible disembarkation of migrants, but when they went to the place there was no one on board the boat, according to NBC6.
Images shared by social networks and provided by their author to the aforementioned outlet show the moment when the boat runs aground on the sand of the beach and about a dozen immigrants quickly descend from it.
The Miami Beach Police Department (MBPD) explained that they had received information that the boat had been stolen from Bimini, which is why they contacted the Border Patrol to conduct an investigation.
Bimini is the westernmost district of the Bahamas, made up of a chain of islands located about 53 miles (81 km) east of Miami, making it the closest point to the United States of the Bahamas.
In the video filmed by Sergey Allen no distinctive signs of the boat can be seen, but evidently it is not one of the precarious boats built and used by the cuban rafters to emigrate to the United States.
The boat, which was found washed up on the beach between 37th and 39th streets and Collins Avenue, may have been used in a human smuggling operation.
It is not the first time that motor boats from the Bahamas with irregular immigrants on board have arrived on the Florida coast. On several previous occasions they have been intercepted by the authorities and identified as groups of multiple nationalities.
In late April, agents from the USBP and the Southeast Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) They detained a boat for an alleged case of maritime smuggling.
“Agents responded to an intercepted maritime smuggling event near Key Biscayne and encountered 13 migrants (China, Ecuador, Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic). The event is under investigation,” the agent said on Twitter. Walter N. Slosarwho shared a photograph of the motorboat used for the illegal landing.
Days before, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) transferred 20 Cuban rafters to the Bahamas after rescuing them at Dog Rocks, a rock in the Bimini district, in the Bahamas archipelago.
Operations of this type occur with some frequency from the beginning of the Cuban migration crisissince many emigrants use the Bahamas as a starting point in their expeditions to the United States, a flow that has not stopped even with the new measures taken by the Biden administration.
Only in the week of January 20 to 27, the USCG repatriated 420 Cuban rafters and transferred 424 immigrants to the Bahamasmany of which would also be from the island.
In 2022, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas detained 623 Cuban migrants, an overwhelmingly higher number compared to the 17 detained in 2021, according to the authorities of the Caribbean country.
