Migrants at Texas border in shock after Trump canceled their asylum appointments

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CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Margelis Tinoco Lopez arrived at the border at 4 a.m. Monday for her 1 p.m. immigration appointment along with her husband and her 13-year-old son. Standing on the bridge in below-freezing weather, Lopez got an email from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that made her heart drop: “Existing appointments scheduled through the CBP One application are no longer valid.”

She broke down in tears.

“I’m devastated,” she said, sitting on a chair at a Juárez migrant shelter. “It feels like a sense of instability, and I feel vulnerable and scared.”

Tinoco Lopez is among the thousands of migrants who had hoped to enter the United States legally but saw their long-awaited appointments canceled shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated Monday. Video of her crying at a bridge that connects El Paso and Juárez has spread across social media, which makes her worried for her safety, she said.

On his first day back in office, Trump made good on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration, starting with shutting down the use of an app that let migrants make appointments to request asylum. The Biden administration had allowed 1,450 appointments daily at eight different ports of entry along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.

Nearly 300,000 people a day tried to get an appointment, some waiting several months before they got lucky. More than 936,500 people had secured appointments since January 2023, according to CBP.

Trump also issued an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship and declared an emergency at the border intended to allow the federal government to send the military and National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border. And he halted refugee resettlement, a program through which thousands of people fleeing war and persecution have entered the U.S.

Migrants immediately felt the impact of Trump’s immigration agenda.

Tinoco Lopez and her family left Colombia six months ago with the hope of migrating to the U.S. She declined to speak in detail about the reasons they left, but she said her oldest child was killed in her home country.

After arriving in Mexico City late last year, she downloaded the CBP One app on her cell phone to attempt to get an appointment to request asylum. On Jan. 1, she finally received her appointment, so she and her family sold what little they had and bought one-way tickets to Juárez.

“We were so happy, we thought we were finally going to be able to enter the U.S.,” said José Loaiza, Tinoco Lopez’s husband. “They made us feel hope because they said they would take us in for our appointment at 11 a.m. But when we found out they wouldn’t let us in it was just an overwhelming feeling that came over us.”

Pastor Juan Fierro García, who runs a migrant shelter in the outskirts of Juárez, said before Monday, 12 migrants were staying in his shelter. But with the mass cancellation of appointments, he expects that number to grow.

“There’s just a lot of uncertainty right now,” he said.

At the cafeteria inside a Catholic church in the city’s plaza, Jesse Palmera, 31, ate beans, white bread and oatmeal. The Church provides free food and legal consultations for migrants seeking to enter the U.S. Palmera, who left Venezuela with his younger brother in April to migrate to the U.S., had an appointment with immigration officials for Jan. 28.

His father, back in Venezuela, called him on Monday afternoon to ask if the news that the Trump administration had revoked the appointments was true. Palmera said that’s how he discovered that his opportunity to enter legally had vanished.

“When I got the appointment, I thought, ‘My parents and sisters won’t have to suffer economically because I can finally work and send money back home,’” he said.

“My dad just told me, ‘If it’s God’s will, you’ll be able to enter the U.S.,’” Palmera said.

Cristina Coronado, coordinator for the Ministry for Migrants of the Missionary Society of Saint Columban, which offers the services inside the Catholic church, said that she hasn’t seen more migrants coming to the center but they have been bombarded with questions that they can’t answer.

She said she has advised people not to cross the border illegally or hire someone to smuggle them.

“I’m hoping there will be a moment of peace and clarity so that both country’s governments can talk and find a solution,” she said. “I hope they think of the people because, unfortunately, in the past few years, they’ve not thought about the migrants’ needs.”

Almost instantly, Trump’s moves on immigration were challenged.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to halt the order targeting birthright citizenship and filed a request for a hearing regarding the end of asylum appointments through CBP One, the phone app.

“We are working hard on bringing other lawsuits,” said Cecillia Wang of the ACLU. “We are coming to court in order to stand up for your rights.”

Other lawsuits may follow.

Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, said the executive order ending birthright citizenship is at odds with the 14th Amendment, which assures citizenship for all. She said the executive orders to shut down the border and reinstate “remain in Mexico” — a policy that forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are pending — violate domestic and international laws, and questioned the justification for declaring a national emergency at the southern border because the number of illegal crossings is currently low.

“Just because the president does it, it doesn’t make it legal,” Mukherjee said. “It doesn’t make it right.”

In South Texas, Andrea Rudnik worried that Trump’s executive orders could cause a chilling effect for organizations like the one she co-founded, Team Brownsville, which provides migrants with humanitarian aid. The organization has already been targeted by Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has launched investigations into several shelters and nonprofits that help migrants.

“We haven’t seen the worst of it yet,” Rudnik said, nodding to Trump’s promised mass deportations. “There’s just a lot of unknown. We will continue to try to serve in the best way that we can. The pathway is not clear at this point.”

Jennifer Babaie, the director of legal services for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an El Paso nonprofit that provides migrants with legal services, said she will closely follow how federal agencies try to implement the orders so that she can try to protect people she represents from wrongful deportation.

“These executive orders — no matter your political party — totally disregard civil liberties,” Babaie said. “If a government can come in on day one and put this much restriction on civil liberties, what else would they be willing to do?”