The mysterious billboards and digital ads surfaced in April, difficult for Miami’s drivers, internet surfers and social media users to miss. “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.”
Now, after months of anonymity, the leader of the unusual campaign, Michael B. Fernández, has decided to go public for the first time, explaining why he is spending millions — or even tens of millions — of his fortune on the ads.
Mr. Fernández, a billionaire philanthropist and the chairman of MBF Healthcare Partners, a private investment firm in Coral Gables, Fla., said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday that he hoped to “wake up the conscience” of Miamians, especially fellow Cuban Americans. He fears they fail to see parallels between the strongmen they fled and what he says is the United States’ eroding democracy.
“We are seeing a replay of what I saw when I was 12 years old and left Cuba,” said Mr. Fernández, 73, who is known as Mike. “It is beyond troubling. It is scary.”
Mr. Fernández is a former Republican who left the party more than a decade ago to register without party affiliation.
The ad campaign, run by a political group called Keep Them Honest, has made Mr. Fernández something of an outlier in Florida, which has moved decidedly to the political right. That trend has occurred throughout Miami-Dade County, where several cities have some of the country’s highest levels of foreign-born residents, most of them Hispanic. Republicans have defended President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as necessary to ensure the rule of law after the number of migrants crossing the southern border surged in recent years.
Mr. 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: Representatives 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 Mr. Trump. Ms. 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.
When a local Spanish-language television station asked Mr. Diaz-Balart recently about the ads, he said that it was a point of “much pride” for “the extreme left to criticize me.”
“Congressman — it’s not them,” Mr. Fernández wrote, referring to the “extreme left,” in a letter that he plans to publish soon to reveal his campaign involvement. “It’s us.”
It was not previously known that Mr. Fernández has led the ad campaign, but he has excoriated the three Republicans before. In May, he wrote a letter urging them to stand up to Mr. Trump. He also took out full-page ads against them in The Times and The Wall Street Journal decrying their “complicity and cowardice.”
Mr. Fernández knows his campaign to unseat any of the three representatives might fail: They are well known, none of their districts are very competitive and, Mr. Fernández said, there does not appear to be strong prospective Democratic candidates to challenge them.
As much as he is pouring his money into the ads, Mr. Fernández acknowledged that just spending his fortune may not be enough to reach his goal. “It cannot just be cash on the table,” he said.
By putting his name to the campaign, Mr. Fernández said he would like to initiate a “movement” of like-minded donors, activists and voters to commit to robustly challenging congressional Republicans in the midterms, who he says have not done enough to challenge the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Mr. 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. Mr. 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, Mr. Fernández donated more than $30 million to Republican candidates over the years, including small contributions in the past to Ms. Salazar, whom he is now targeting. He also served as finance co-chairman of the 2014 re-election campaign of former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, and donated millions to Jeb Bush’s Republican presidential campaign in 2016. After Mr. Trump won that year’s primary, Mr. Fernández endorsed Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, in the general election.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 undocumented students scholarships to private schools.
“I have to leave a mark,” he said, “an example to my family and my children.”
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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