Cuban National Charged with Drugging and Raping Miami Woman Had Been Released Into U.S. Under Biden-Era Catch-and-Release

Yusel Keoma Perez-Leyva, 42, was arrested on June 18 in Doral, Florida, on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting a Miami woman. According to the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office report cited by CiberCuba, the victim woke up in the emergency room of HCA Florida Palm Lakes in Hialeah with no memory of how she got there. She told police she believed she had been drugged after leaving a nightclub in Miami Beach in the early hours of June 4, more than two weeks before the arrest.

Surveillance footage reviewed by investigators reportedly shows Perez-Leyva carrying the woman, who appears unconscious, into an apartment near Miami Lakes. During interrogation, according to CiberCuba's account of the detective report, Perez-Leyva admitted he picked the woman up while working as an Uber driver and acknowledged having had sex with her while he described himself as intoxicated. He faces two counts: kidnapping, punishable by life in prison, and sexual battery against a physically incapacitated victim, which carries up to 30 years.

Uber confirmed in a statement cited by DHS that Perez-Leyva was an active driver on the platform but was not using the app at the time of the incident.

On June 20, a Miami-Dade judge denied bail. His arraignment before Circuit Judge Alberto Milian is scheduled for July 9, according to CiberCuba.

ICE Detainer and the Biden Policy Question

ICE lodged a detainer against Perez-Leyva on June 18, the same day as his arrest, according to the DHS press release. Acting Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis said the request asks Miami-Dade corrections officials to notify ICE before any potential release so federal agents can take custody.

"This sexual predator was released into our country by the Biden Administration," Bis said. "Because Florida cooperates with ICE, he will be turned over to ICE custody and never released into American communities again."

Perez-Leyva illegally crossed into Arizona in 2021. DHS says he was subsequently released into the interior under what the agency describes as the Biden administration's catch-and-release policy, under which migrants who crossed the border were often processed and paroled into the country pending immigration proceedings.

Critics of the current DHS framing would note that catch-and-release was in large part a legal and logistical response to court-ordered limits on detention capacity and congressional refusal to fund additional beds, not simply a policy preference by Biden or then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Under those constraints, releasing migrants with pending immigration cases was sometimes the only available option. They point out that the vast majority of people released under that policy never committed a violent crime, and that attributing one man's alleged assault to an entire administration's immigration posture is a political argument rather than a causal one.

Perez-Leyva was in the country in 2021 after an illegal border crossing and was not detained. He was living and working in South Florida five years later. The DHS statement attributing his presence here to Biden-era policy is an official, on-record claim. Whether the policy was the correct response to legal and logistical constraints, or was negligent, is a legitimate policy debate.

Florida's Cooperation vs. Sanctuary Jurisdictions

CiberCuba's reporting highlights a detail the Breitbart piece and the DHS release mention only in passing: Florida's active ICE cooperation agreements are what make the detainer enforceable here. In jurisdictions designated as sanctuary cities, that detainer could be ignored, and Perez-Leyva could have walked out of local custody before federal agents arrived. In such places, the DHS pledge of "never released into American communities again" would not hold.

The broader DHS press releases page shows this case is one of several ICE detainer actions in Florida in recent weeks, including a separate detainer on an illegal alien charged with homicide and an HSI arrest connected to a fatal hit-and-run.

Perez-Leyva has admitted to sex with the victim and to picking her up while driving for Uber, but has not entered a formal plea to the criminal charges in any source reviewed. His July 9 arraignment before Judge Milian will be the first moment the court record reflects how he responds to the kidnapping and sexual battery counts.