Miami’s mystery billboards: All about the billionaire who was once a Republican, and is now targeting them in Florida

After months of anonymity, the identity of the person behind the mysterious billboards and digital ads which surfaced in April, difficult for Miami's drivers, internet surfers and social media users to miss, targeting Republicans has been revealed.

"Deporting immigrants is cruel," one said, featuring the faces of Cuban American Republicans in Congress. More ads followed, most recently trying to denounce the politicians for a new state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as "Alligator Alcatraz."

Who was paying for the ads, billboards?

Fernández, a billionaire philanthropist and chair of MBF Healthcare Partners, a private investment firm based in Coral Gables, Florida, told The New York Times on Friday that he hopes to "wake up the conscience" of Miami residents—particularly fellow Cuban Americans. He expressed concern that many are overlooking the similarities between the authoritarian leaders they once fled and what he sees as the declining state of democracy in the United States.


"We are seeing a replay of what I saw when I was 12 years old and left Cuba," Fernández told NYT.

Fernández is a former Republican who left the party more than a decade ago to register without party affiliation, reported NYT.

The ad campaign, backed by the political group Keep Them Honest, has turned Fernández into a rare voice of dissent in a state that has shifted sharply to the right. This conservative wave has swept through Miami-Dade County, despite the region being home to some of the nation’s highest concentrations of foreign-born residents, many of them Hispanic. Republicans have stood by former President Donald Trump’s tough stance on illegal immigration, framing it as essential for upholding the rule of law amid a surge in border crossings in recent years.

Fernández's immediate goal is to help oust in next year's midterm elections at least one of the state's three Cuban American Republican members of Congress: Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos A. Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar.

The three Republicans, however, have not entirely supported the White House's immigration crackdown. They have pushed back against the administration's move to strip deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, a rare instance of dissent between congressional Republicans and Trump. Salazar has also noted that she filed legislation to provide some immigrants a path to legal status, though the effort has not gained much traction.

Fernández said he had privately persuaded more than 30 donors, about a third of them Republicans, to contribute since April to Keep Them Honest. As a "dark money" group, Keep Them Honest can fund issue ads and does not have to disclose its donors.

He would like more of them to speak publicly but is not sure if they will for fear of retaliation. Fernández said he had received threats and lost investors, friends and close contact with some family members as a result of his political involvement.

By his estimation, Fernández donated more than $30 million to Republican candidates over the years, including small contributions in the past to Salazar, whom he is now targeting. He also served as finance co-chair of the 2014 reelection campaign of former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, and donated millions to Jeb Bush's Republican presidential campaign in 2016. After Trump won that year's primary, Fernández endorsed Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, in the general election.

Fernández's family arrived in New York in 1965. He remembered how other immigrants in the city, from Mexico and Ireland, gave him snow boots and a coat. He later served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army.

He recently rescinded a $10 million donation to Miami Dade College and a $1 million donation to Florida International University, both public institutions. It was a response to state lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, repealing legislation from 2014 that allowed certain immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children to pay in-state tuition rates.

Fernández had forcefully lobbied for the original law, which hangs framed on his office wall. He said he was redirecting some of that money to a nonprofit that provides students lacking permanent legal status with scholarships to private schools.

"I have to leave a mark," he said, "an example to my family and my children."