Border freeze

An hour after President Donald Trump officially took office last Monday, asylum-seekers in Juarez, Mexico, opened their phones to find their appointments for 11 a.m. local time at the port of entry into El Paso, Texas, had been canceled. Those with appointments for 10 a.m. were able to keep them. Many of those waiting had submitted their request every day for months through the CBP One mobile app.

“They were crying, waiting … to see if [the administration] change[d] their mind,” said Rosalío Sosa, a pastor who oversees several immigrant shelters in Juarez, a bustling commercial center infamous for rampant gang violence. Trump’s change hit the border cities just as they descended into a cold snap. “Most of them return[ed] to the shelters … they really don’t know what to do.”

Ministry leaders operating shelters along the U.S.-Mexico border are opening their doors to asylum-seekers who are biding their time in hopes that the Trump administration will ease its crackdown. It’s unclear when, or if, the administration will open another pathway to apply for asylum, and analysts warn that while the blockade may deter some illegal crossers in the short term, it could push others into the arms of smugglers.

Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order closing down the feature of the CBP One app that allowed migrants to make an appointment at a port of entry to begin the asylum process. If they passed an initial screening, they were paroled into the country to await their asylum hearing in immigration court. The Biden administration created the app in 2023 to encourage people to cross the border legally at ports of entry instead of sneaking through elsewhere. Last June, the Biden administration effectively closed the border between ports of entry. Under the restrictions, immigrants who crossed illegally without making an appointment on the app wrecked their chances of being granted asylum when they presented their case in court. Customs and Border Protection issued a maximum of 1,450 CBP One appointments every day.

Critics of the system pointed to haphazard vetting procedures. They argued many individuals granted entry into the United States had asylum cases that would not hold up in court. In his executive order, Trump called the CBP One app a means of “paroling or facilitating the entry of inadmissible aliens.” In a scathing audit published in June 2024, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security found Customs and Border Protection officers “could not access all federal data necessary to enable complete screening and vetting of noncitizens seeking admission into the United States.”

Two months later, the inspector general’s office identified 1,696 noncitizens who, through the app, identified one of just seven addresses as their intended destination in their applications. The applicants entered through different ports of entry, and many did not appear to be related. The report analyzed appointments issued between Jan. 12 and Aug. 18, 2023. In what the inspector general called a “particularly striking example,” his office found 358 of those noncitizens reported the same four-bedroom, single-family home. Based on an analysis of the applicants’ last names, 266 did not appear to be related. Customs and Border Protection data from December 2024 shows 936,500 individuals successfully scheduled appointments at ports of entry through the app while it was active.

Biden also implemented a third-country transit ban barring most immigrants from requesting asylum unless they provided proof they had already asked for asylum in another country on the way to the United States and been denied. Immigrant advocacy organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged Biden’s asylum restrictions in court, arguing they violated a provision of U.S. immigration law that allows an individual to request asylum once they reach U.S. soil, “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.” That case is still winding its way through the courts.

When Trump canceled the appointment feature on the CBP One app, he shut down the only remaining asylum pathway. On inauguration day, about 800 people with appointments entered the United States through a port of entry before the official transfer of power, according to Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.

“So desperate folks fleeing their countries have no safe way to enter the U.S.,” said Stephen Reeves, who is the executive director of Fellowship Southwest, an organization that also supports shelters and pastors. He fears that as shelters continue to fill up, immigrants camping along the border will fall prey to cartel violence and kidnapping. Others may turn to “increasingly dangerous ways to cross unauthorized, including paying coyotes,” or smugglers, Reeves warned.

Pastor Juvenal González regularly hosts asylum-seekers in his home in Tijuana, Mexico, a city of more than 2 million directly across the border from San Diego. He told me many of the immigrants who requested CBP One appointments with the aim of finding work and building a better life are heading home. “Some of the people cannot go back because they’ve been persecuted,” he noted. That includes a Christian family fleeing government repression in Russia who has been staying in González’s home while waiting for an appointment.

The Trump administration has also resumed the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as “Remain in Mexico,” a program that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until a judge heard their cases in immigration court. Soto, with the Migration Policy Institute, noted that the program would function differently than it did during Trump’s first administration because immigrants don’t have a legal means of requesting asylum.

While immigrants could try to walk up to a port of entry and request an asylum hearing, Soto said it’s unclear whether CBP officers will allow them to present their case. WORLD contacted CBP to ask whether it would allow walk-up asylum claims at ports of entry but did not receive a response before publication. Arguing the border crisis constitutes an invasion, Trump directed immigration authorities to “immediately repel immigrants across the southern border.” He contended U.S. immigration law gives him the authority to turn back immigrants without allowing them to step onto American soil and make an asylum claim until the “invasion at the southern border has ceased.”

Few people know how this will work in practice and whether the administration will permit any exceptions. For now, it’s likely U.S. immigration authorities shuttling people back to Mexico will be returning them for good, not just to wait for a hearing, Soto said, but “there hasn’t yet been a full agreement with Mexico on who they'll take back for how long,” he added. Pastor Gonzalez in Tijuana told WORLD that Mexican immigration authorities are also stopping some asylum-seekers before they can present themselves at a U.S. port of entry.

Back in Juarez, Rosalío Sosa, the pastor overseeing several shelters, told me that since Trump canceled CBP One’s appointment feature, only a few immigrants he knows have decided to return home. About 97% want to wait and “see what happens,” he estimated, in hopes that “Trump is going to tell us what to do.”

Sosa’s shelters are quickly reaching capacity, and he’s worried individuals unwilling to make the dangerous trek back home will soon resort to unlawful methods of gaining entry into the U.S.

“The traffickers? They are making a lot of money,” he said.