Marco Rubio Biography Reveals Grandfather Was Ordered Deported
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Joe Raedle/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — A forthcoming biography of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will reveal that his grandfather was ordered deported from the U.S. after flying in from Cuba without a visa.
A preview of The Rise of Marco Rubio, an unauthorized biography written by Manuel Roig-Franzia, a reporter with the Washington Post, was obtained by Politico and details the immigration travails of Rubio’s grandfather, a fact that could increase scrutiny on the potential VP pick.
According to the preview, Rubio’s maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, had emigrated to the United States, but chose to return to Cuba to tend to the shoe store he left behind in Havana after dictator Fulgencio Batista abdicated his rule. The book explains that upon his return, he began working for the Castro government at Cuba’s Treasury Ministry, but as he grew uncomfortable with Fidel Castro’s regime, Rubio’s grandfather tried to make his way back to the United States without a visa, 10 years before Rubio was born.
“It was that on August 31, 1962, he took an incredibly risky step. He bought a ticket and boarded Pan American Airlines flight 2422 bound for Miami. Pedro Victor’s troubles began not long after the plane landed. He had a Cuban passport and a U.S. alien registration card, but he didn’t have a visa,” the preview reads. “A U.S. immigration official named E.E. Spink detained the 63-year-old grandfather. Spink signed a form that read, ‘you do not appear to me to be clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to enter the United States.’ A photographer snapped a mug shot of Pedro Victor with his alien registration number on a block in front of him. … His cheeks were sunken, there were bags under his eyes, and his mouth was tight.”
“The paper trail is inconclusive about whether he was forced to spend time in a detention facility,” the preview continues. “… On October 4, 1962, Pedro Victor appeared before a special inquiry officer, a kind of immigration judge, named Milton V. Milich … Milich orders ‘that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States.’”
“Pedro Victor … did not leave the country as ordered,” the preview reads. “In those days deportees weren’t necessarily thrown onto a plane … Pedro Victor’s legal status would remain unresolved for years. He stayed in Miami … [In 1967] Pedro Victor returned to the immigration bureaucracy to ask, once again, to become a permanent resident. … The form he filled out then states that he had been a Cuban refugee since February 1965. Refugee status may have been granted retroactively.”
Roig-Franzia’s book will also shed light on the Rubio family’s dabbling in Mormonism while they lived in Las Vegas, beginning when Rubio was seven or eight years old. In an interview earlier this month, Rubio said he remembers little of his family’s involvement with Mormonism and says he is a practicing Roman Catholic.
The Rise of Marco Rubio is set to be released on June 19, the same day as Rubio’s autobiography, An American Son: A Memoir.
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