Can’t recall when or where I read about this story, but it was long ago when I was very young:
“The US could have agreed to allow the passengers of the St. Louis to land and wait in America for their visas to be processed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who a few years later would use an executive order to round up tens of thousands of Japanese Americans and put them in concentration camps, could have ordered that 900 German Jews be allowed to stay. He did not do so. FDR’s defenders (like his presidential library) stress that he never issued a “specific or official order to turn them away.” But he didn’t have to. His government was doing that for him.”
Yes. They were going to be landed in Cuba, State pressured Cuba not to allow them to land as they might find their way to the US.