Prominent Cuban dissidents José Daniel Ferrer and Félix Navarro, who were released earlier this year under a Vatican-brokered deal, were detained Tuesday morning and sent back to prison in what activists say is retaliation for his denunciations of the humanitarian situation on the island and advocacy on behalf of political prisoners.

In a statement, Cuba’s supreme court said the two violated the terms of their release and local courts revoked their parole. The statement said Ferrer will need to complete the remaining time on a four-and-a-half-year sentence. But by the time he was released in January, he had already served that much time.

The statement adds that Navarro, 72, will need to complete the last five years of a nine-year-sentence.

Ferrer, his wife, Nelva Ortega, and their five-year-old son were detained after Cuban authorities broke into their home in the Altamira neighborhood in Santiago de Cuba on Tuesday morning, his sister, Ana Belkis Ferrer, said on X. The house also serves as the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, UNPACU, the opposition group Ferrer leads.

As of Tuesday afternoon, his brother Luis Enrique Ferrer, a former political prisoner who went into exile in the United States, told the Miami Herald he did not know the whereabouts of Ferrer and his family. He said three other UNPACU activists were also arrested.

Ferrer was one of the most prominent political prisoners on the island and had been released in January under a deal brokered by the Vatican and the Biden administration in exchange for the U.S. removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

“Two-time Cuban political prisoner Félix Navarro was arrested at 6 a.m. by three police officers from outside the area,” the Cuban American National Foundation said in a Spanish post on its X account. “His home was surrounded and monitored by state security throughout the night. Furthermore, Félix’s and many activists’ internet access was cut off.”

Like the more than a hundred political prisoners released under the Vatican deal, Ferrer and Navarro were not given a pardon or amnesty but were released on conditional parole. In a statement sent to news agencies Reuters and EFE, Maricela Sosa, vice president of Cuba’s Supreme Popular Tribunal, said that Ferrer was arrested for violating the terms of his parole.

“Not only did he not show up” to two court hearings, Sosa said, “he also announced through his social media profile, in flagrant defiance and non-compliance with the law, that he would not appear before the judicial authority.”

Shortly after he was freed in January, Ferrer told the Miami Herald that he had refused to sign a document describing the conditions of his release presented by Interior Ministry officers at the maximum-security Mar Verde prison where he was being held. He contended he had been unfairly imprisoned.

“They wanted to impose conditions on me. They say that I am on parole, which I do not accept,” he said in an interview at the time in which he recounted abuses suffered in prison. “They threatened that I could go back to prison. I told them verbatim, ‘Well, don’t release me. Leave me locked up because I am not going to let any kind of measure or conditions be imposed on me, and I am going to continue fighting for freedom, democracy and respect for human rights.’”

Ferrer had been arrested as he attempted to join a street protest in Santiago de Cuba during the July 2021 islandwide uprising. Navarro was also arrested on July 11, 2021, along with his daughter, Saily Navarro, in Matanzas, as were hundreds of demonstrators across the country. Saily Navarro is still in prison.

The arrests of the prominent dissidents happen at a time discontent with the deteriorating economic situation on the island is high and Trump administration officials have vowed to implement policies to further tighten the screws on the regime to seek political change.

On his first day in office, Trump reinstated Cuba on the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism. Soon after, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American, announced new sanctions while promising a “tough Cuba policy,” doing away with the incentives granted by the previous administration to release the political prisoners. Around the time Trump took office, Cuban authorities stopped the release of political prisoners.

In an interview with Cuban state media on Tuesday afternoon, Sosa said Ferrer and Navarro have been in frequent contact with the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Mike Hammer, and suggested that might also be considered a crime that could be investigated by Cuban authorities. The supreme court statement also included a similar remark.

The comments suggest the arrests are meant to send a signal to Washington that Cuban authorities are prepared to further crack down on dissent as a response to Trump’s tougher policies.

Earlier this year, Cuban authorities allowed Hammer to travel to Santiago de Cuba to meet with Ferrer and to Matanzas to meet with Navarro. But when he accompanied Berta Soler, the leader of the dissident group Ladies in White, to Palm Sunday Mass at the Church of Santa Rita in Havana, Cuban authorities detained her and her husband, Angel Moya, also a dissident, and placed them under house arrest.

Activist Rosa María Payá, who has been nominated by the U.S. government to serve at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a regional organization, said the arrests of Ferrer and Navarro are retaliation for their “denunciations of the failed state conditions in which Cubans are living and their constant advocacy for a democratic change in Cuba.”

Ferrer and Navarro were part of a prominent group of 75 dissidents who were rounded up and imprisoned by Cuban authorities during the so-called Black Spring in 2003. When they were released years later, they refused to leave the island.

After they were freed again this January, they continued advocating for the release of other political prisoners.

Ferrer also angered Cuban authorities after he, his wife, who is a doctor, and other UNPACU activists started providing humanitarian aid and basic health checks to poor and sick Santiago de Cuba residents. Some activists involved in those efforts have been detained recently.

After he virtually joined a hearing on human rights in Cuba held by the European parliament two weeks ago along with Payá, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma published an angry article calling them “perverse” and “mercenaries.”

Navarro, a Catholic, said on his Facebook account that he had been detained several Sundays in a row while trying to attend Mass along with his wife, a member of the dissident group the Ladies in White, in his hometown of Perico in Matanzas.

Tuesday’s detentions happened just days after the death of Pope Francis, who helped broker the deal to get Ferrer and Navarro released in January.

Cuban leaders Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel “have not waited even 72 hours after Francis’ burial to undo their commitments,” the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a groups based in Madrid, said in a statement noting “the increasing repressive climate on the island.”

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