US Coast Guard

The US Coast Guard is the principal US federal agency for maritime law enforcement, search and rescue, and migrant interdiction in coastal and offshore waters. It operates under the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and can be placed under the Department of Defense in wartime. The service operates globally across five geographic districts; in the Caribbean and Florida Straits, the Seventh District (headquartered in Miami) and HSTF-SE (Homestead) Conduct Operation Vigilant Sentry, the sustained interdiction posture covering Cuban and Haitian migration surges.

The Coast Guard's Cuba interdiction mission dates to the 1994 rafter crisis and is governed by a bilateral US-Cuba migration accord. Under this framework, intercepted Cubans are repatriated rather than admitted as refugees. The end of the wet-foot/dry-foot policy in January 2017 removed a key legal protection that had allowed Cubans who reached US soil to remain; since then all intercepted migrants at sea are repatriated. The Coast Guard also conducts counter-narcotics operations in the same waters.

In 2026, with EO 14380 deepening Cuba's economic crisis and daily blackouts extending to 12 or more hours, the Coast Guard faces a migration environment defined by desperation rather than economic calculation. The service has issued repeated public warnings about the dangers of irregular maritime crossings. The same operational environment (Caribbean corridor, multi-country migration, international waters enforcement) makes the Coast Guard a relevant actor any time regional instability drives maritime departures from Caribbean or Central American states, not solely Cuba.