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.[19][21][22][23] Nicky Mayorkas studied economics at Dartmouth College.[23]
His mother, Anita (Gabor),[23] was a Romanian Jew whose family escaped the Holocaust and fled to Cuba in the 1940s[24][25][26] before leaving for the United States after the Cuban Revolution