Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas,[13] nicknamed Ali,[14][15] was born in Havana, Cuba, on November 24, 1959.[3] When he was one year old, his parents fled with him and his sister to the United States in 1960 as refugees, following the Cuban Revolution. He lived in Miami, Florida, before his family moved to Los Angeles, California, where he was raised for the remainder of his youth.[16] Mayorkas grew up in Beverly Hills and attended Beverly Hills High School.[17]
His father, Charles R. "Nicky" Mayorkas, was born in Cuba. He was a Cuban Jew of Sephardi (from the former Ottoman Empire, present-day Turkey and Greece) and Ashkenazi (from Poland) background. He owned and operated a steel wool factory on the outskirts of Havana.[16][18][19][20] Nicky Mayorkas studied economics at Dartmouth College.[20]
His mother, Anita (Gabor),[21] was a Romanian Jew whose family escaped the Holocaust and fled to Cuba in the 1940s