More billboards go up in Miami-Dade hitting Rubio, Republican Congress members on immigration

David Smiley, Miami Herald on Apr 28, 2025

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MIAMI — Another group critical of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign and funding cuts to pro-democracy groups in the Americas is launching an ad campaign on Miami’s highways and airwaves to pressure Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Miami’s Republican U.S. representatives to stand up to the president.

A spokesman for Keep Them Honest said Sunday that the newly formed dark-money organization — which does not have to disclose its donors — has erected billboards on the Palmetto Expressway, Don Shula Expressway and Florida Turnpike criticizing Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez in their districts.

“Deporting good immigrants back to dictatorships is cruel,” states an ad that the group began running Monday on MiamiHerald.com.

Seven total billboards will carry the message over South Florida’s highways, said Chris Wills, a spokesman for the group. He said Keep Them Honest, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, has also been running digital ads in the congressional members’ districts.

Wills said the goal is to pressure the politicians to stand up against Trump.

“They have the ability to make demands for what we know traditionally these members of Congress have said they have stood for,” said Wills, “which is to defend the rights of those who have fled dictatorships and have come to this country seeking the American dream.”

Spokespersons for the four politicians did not immediately respond to Monday morning emails seeking comment.

The ad campaign is the latest to claim that Miami’s Cuban American members of Congress are keeping a low profile as Trump’s administration moves to end Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and Haitians and revoke a Biden-era parole program for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. The Miami-Dade Democratic Hispanic Caucus rolled out its own blitz early this month against Rubio and the three U.S. representatives, who represent large numbers of immigrants.

Rubio, a former U.S. senator, and Miami-Dade’s Republican delegation in Congress all publicly supported TPS and the CHNV parole program prior to Trump’s move to terminate the initiatives — efforts that have been largely blocked by the courts.

But they also supported Trump’s promises to clean up a migration crisis at the U.S. southern border by taking a hard stance on immigration and deporting millions of people. A majority of voters in Miami-Dade and in their districts voted for Trump.

“If you’re in this country unlawfully, you have no right to be here and you must be removed. That’s what the law says,” Rubio said Sunday on NBC’s "Meet the Press." “Somehow over the last 20 years we’ve completely ... adopted this idea that, yes, we have immigration laws but once you come into our country illegally it triggers all sorts of rights that can keep you here indefinitely. And that’s why we were being flooded at the border. And we’ve ended that.”

Miami’s Republican members of Congress have pushed back against the notion that they have been idle on immigration matters that affect their constituents. Since Trump began moving to revoke legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, they have said in interviews that they are lobbying the White House to give deserving immigrants a chance to stay.

After Coral Gables billionaire and former GOP donor Mike Fernandez singled the members out in a Miami Herald op-ed this month, Salazar noted that she has refiled her Dignity Act, a bill seeking to create a pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people that is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled chamber. She said she is also “the lead Republican sponsor of the American Dream and Promise Act, the American Families United Act and the Venezuelan Adjustment Act, laws designed to protect families and those fleeing brutality.”

“These actions are the opposite of ‘silence,’” she wrote.

The ads also take aim at Trump’s decision to take a hatchet to programs that funded pro-democracy groups in places like Cuba, by cutting USAID, which Rubio now oversees. Trump’s administration also temporarily shut down Radio and TV Marti, which broadcast news independent of the Cuban state to the island, though the stations are back up and running.

“The entire campaign is focused on ensuring those members of this community who are right now living in fear and are very disappointed and frustrated ... to serve as their voice and ensure our members of Congress, who are all from this community, all children of immigrants themselves, that they see it and they know this community finds their silence as complicity,” said Wills. “We know they have the power to take action on this.”

Wills declined to discuss the group’s donors or the cost of the ad campaign. Along with Wills, Juan-Carlos Planas, a former Republican state representative who switched to the Democratic Party several years ago, is a registered officer of Keep Them Honest Inc. The group was incorporated in Florida this month.

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