Billboards rise, ads run bashing Marco Rubio, Miami-Dade lawmakers on immigration, defunding

Miami-Dade County’s roadways and digital airwaves will carry more bilingual messages designed to put the county’s Republican officials in Washington on blast for not standing against President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts.

Keep Them Honest Inc., a newly incorporated Miami nonprofit, plans to plaster billboards along every highway in the county with signage calling out U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez.

All four of them have failed “to defend the very communities they were elected to represent,” the group said, and should answer for their “cruelty and complicity … as immigrant families face unprecedented threats under the Trump administration’s inhumane and un-American executive orders.”

The ads also highlight Trump’s efforts to shutter USAID and reduce the operation of Radio Martí, a decades-long U.S.-government-funded station that broadcasts uncensored programming to Cuba, to the minimum required by law.

“The goal is if you’re a constituent or resident of their district, you will see these outside and online,” said Keep Them Honest Vice President and spokesperson Chris Wills, a longtime Democratic operative who last year worked as the campaign manager for ex-Key Biscayne Mayor Mike Davey’s Congressional campaign.

Juan-Carlos “J.C.” Planas, a Republican-turned-Democratic former state lawmaker who last year unsuccessfully ran for Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections, is the organization’s President, its state filings show.

Keep Them Honest is a 501(c)(4) organization, known also as a “dark money” group because it is not legally required to disclose its donors.

Seven billboards already up on the Turnpike, Don Shula Expressway and Palmetto Expressway are an “initial effort” to reach motorists, Wills said, adding that more will come as interest grows.

There are also online ads, including two videos viewable on the organization’s website, that are part of a messaging push Wills described as “a significant investment” in swaying public opinion about their federal representatives.

Wills declined to say how much Keep Them Honest will spend on the campaign, but told Florida Politics it is “an unprecedented buy.”

“We’ve never had, especially in a non-elected year, this level of investment into ensuring that the voice of the community that needs to be heard is heard,” he said.

Keep Them Honest’s ad campaign follows another the Miami-Dade Democratic Hispanic caucus launched early this month targeting Rubio, Díaz-Balart, Salazar and Giménez, deriding them as, among other things, “traitors” to immigrants.

More than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela are at risk of losing their legal status in the U.S. under Trump’s hardline immigration policies, which White House border czar Tom Homan estimates has led to “139,000 deportations.”

The speed and rashness of the program has led to several erroneous deportations, including those of a legal resident who was sent to a notorious El Salvador prison, a 2-year-old U.S. citizen sent to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” and a Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old living in Tampa.

Those and other incidents have drawn legal challenges.

Rubio, Díaz-Balart, Giménez and Salazar — all four children of Cuban exiles — have defended Trump despite the President’s efforts to eliminate protections that allow hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Cubans, and other migrants to live and work legally in the United States.

Court documents released this month show Rubio recommended the termination of Temporary Protected Status for some 600,000 Venezuelans living the U.S. Keeping them here, he told Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a Jan. 31 letter, “is contrary to the national interest of the United States.”

In his recent visit with Republican women, and after not mentioning immigration, one of the few questions Díaz-Balart fielded was about temporary protections to Venezuelans, which Trump is trying to end. Diaz-Balart justified Trump’s actions, saying the President was doing “exactly what he said he was going to do.”

That statement stands in contrast with comments he gave Florida Politics in January, when he said Sunshine State residents who live here illegally but otherwise obey the law have little to fear due to protections in place for expatriates of countries under oppressive regimes.

“You can’t deport them back to those countries,” he said. “You can’t deport somebody back to a country where you know they’re going to suffer real persecution.”

Salazar has been perhaps the most vocal of the three, saying Trump must not eliminate some of the immigration protections that are popular among Miami residents, specifically advocating for Cubans and some Venezuelans. A federal judge recently intervened to block the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. After the judge’s ruling, Salazar gave Trump — not the judge — credit for “doing the right thing.”

Salazar, in an opinion column for the Miami Herald on Friday, defended her record on immigration in response to a letter by a Cuban American health care businessman published in the newspaper. The former GOP political donor accused Salazar, Díaz-Balart, Gimenez and Rubio of “complicity and cowardice” in the face of Trump’s “cruelty toward immigrants.”

“I don’t belong in any letter calling out inaction. I’ve been on the battlefield in Congress, willing to take the political risk and lead the charge,” she wrote.

Salazar’s signature legislation is called the Dignity Act, a voluminous proposal to enable immigrants in the U.S. illegally to stay and work while paying their way into obtaining permanent legal status, with the money going toward border security.

Díaz-Balart joined Salazar and Gimenez releasing a joint statement after Noem announced she was revoking deportation protections for Venezuelans. The lawmakers said they stood in solidarity with Venezuelans, who may be persecuted or oppressed if deported to their native country.

“The Venezuelan people have endured repression, corruption, and human rights abuses for far too long in Venezuela, and it is still not safe for many to return,” the joint statement said.

But the dean of the Florida congressional delegation has mostly defended Trump’s actions, blamed Biden for allowing record-high numbers of immigrants into the U.S. and claimed many migrants who arrived during the Biden administration are criminals. Studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, but some immigrants in the U.S. illegally have been convicted in recent murder cases that gained notoriety during the campaign.

When meeting with Republican women in Miami this month, Díaz-Balart told them he is working with the administration to create a “process” to screen people who come from countries where it is more likely they would have a legitimate case of asylum. He said that while working on that, they have asked to allow those who are already here and are not a threat to the public to remain in the country. But he was still critical of those who are arriving illegally.

Gimenez, a former Mayor of Miami-Dade County, has defended Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration while expressing solidarity with those Venezuelans who receive temporary legal protections.

But the Cuban-born Congressman has gone a step further in proposing cutting off remittances and halting all travel to and from Cuba. That would impact many of those who have arrived more recently who have relatives living on the island.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Giménez said there could be limited exceptions authorized by the State Department.

“The murderous dictatorship in Cuba is on life-support,” he said in the letter. “The regime cannot even keep the lights on. And America must stand with the Cuban people to topple this pathetic gang once and for all.”

In a statement, Giménez’s spokesman Roberto Lugones said the lawmaker believes these actions eliminate Cuba’s revenue streams while “supporting the brave Cuban people in their quest for freedom.” Regarding immigration protections, Giménez wants cases to be decided on an individual basis.

“Congressman Giménez supports a case-by-case solution for exiles with legitimate political asylum claims who are stuck in immigration limbo due to Joe Biden’s incoherent and reckless open-border policies,” the statement said.

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Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Republished with permission.