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and Border Protection that made her heart drop: “Existing appointments scheduled through the CBP One application are no longer valid.”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.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/21 ... ive-order/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?”
TOS is determined to rule by Fiat. He needs to be reminded that his grandparents were immigrants from Germany. This country was built by immigrants. Even the Native Americans were immigrants that crossed over from Asia to what is now Alaska and down into North and South America. They just did it a few thousand years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I wonder how many of his golf courses and club houses along with his hotels and other properties, are maintained by immigrants both legal and illegal?
