ATOTONILLO DE TULLA, Mexico (AP) — When Dana Castro heard that the U.S. asylum appointment he’d waited more than a year for was canceled in an instant, he had no doubt: He was a It was also going towards the north.
Border Patrol Agent Gutierrez detains four people after illegally crossing the border into two walls that separate Mexico from the United States in San Diego, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. went (AP Photo/Gregory Bill)
The 25-year-old immigrant, her husband and their 4- and 7-year-old children had nothing left at home in Venezuela. They had already made the trek The dangerous Darien Gap forest Colombia and Panama and dividing the criminal gangs that prey on refugees like them.
Castro was one of tens of thousands of migrants in Mexico with appointments to apply for U.S. asylum at the border scheduled for February until President Donald Trump took office and an executive order for the beef. What was released? Border security And slash migration. One finished Using the CBP One app It would have allowed nearly one million people, many of them asylum seekers, to enter the United States legally starting in January 2023.
“We will continue. We cannot go home after all these countries, when we have fought our way through all our countries, only to give up now,” he said along a freight train line to Central. A small shelter in Mexico said they were riding. North
Immigrants cross into Mexico after being deported from the United States at the El Chaparral pedestrian border bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Felix Marcos)
Now, immigrants like him are adjusting to a new and uncertain reality. Many are determined to reach the U.S. through increasingly dangerous means, boarding freight trains, hiring smugglers and dodging officials. Some lined up at Mexican refugee offices to seek asylum in the country, while others considered finding a way back home.
Trump declared a national emergency on the US-Mexico border on Monday and announced his plans Send us troops And ban refugees and asylum, saying he wants to curb illegal entry and border crime. A reduction in measures is followed Illegal crossings In recent months.
supporters of CBP One App That people like Castro tried to enter legally says he has ordered a border that borders on chaos. Critics say it was a magnet for more people to come.
Migrants walk through Tapachula, Mexico in an attempt to reach the U.S. border, on the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Edgar H. Clement)
Adam Isaacson, a defense watchdog analyst at the Washington Office of the Human Rights Organization for Latin America, said that Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration is indeed. In the short term it will ensure immigration, but it will also have humanitarian consequences.
People with legitimate asylum claims can die in their own countries, he said, while migrants fleeing countries like Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti who cannot easily return home end up around the U.S. Floating can be “totally unsafe”. Isakin and other analysts expected Trump’s policies to increase demand for smugglers and push immigrants — many of whom There are children and families – in more dangerous regions to avoid arrest.
By Tuesday, Castro was wrapping his mind around the fact that continuing with U.S. officials after his February 18 appointment would mean putting his life, and the lives of his family, in danger. will Cartels are increasingly extorting and kidnapping Vulnerable Migrants.
“There’s the train, the cartels, the immigration police, and they all make you pay them,” he said. “But if we don’t put ourselves at risk, we’ll never get there.”
Another group of migrants in Tapaula, along Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, took a different approach.
Cuban refugee Rosale Martinez waits in line outside the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid in the southern city of Tetila. Traveling with her child, she hoped to be reunited with her husband in America
Migrants board boats to continue their journey north after walking across the Darien Gap from Colombia in Bajo Chiquito, Panama on November 9, 2024.
Now, she was biding her time, joining the growing number of people seeking asylum in Mexico in recent years, either temporarily due to U.S. sanctions being lifted or relocated more permanently. .
Like many Cubans in recent years, Martinez was fleeing an economic crisis.
“I’ll stay here and see what happens,” he said. But “I’m not going back to Cuba. I’m going to become a Mexican citizen, but there’s no way I’m going back to Cuba.
Others like Jamaris Figueira, 42, and her husband want to throw in the towel after trying to make a life outside of Venezuela, where economic and political crises have prompted some 8 million people to flee in recent years.
He spent more than four years picking coffee in neighboring Colombia, but struggling to make ends meet, he decided Cross the Darien Gap. They waited nearly a year and a half for legal passage to the United States in a wooden shelter in a crime-ridden migrant camp in the heart of Mexico City.
But because of the crises in Venezuela, they don’t have passports. And without money, they fear their only route will be to travel south through Mexico and Central America, and spend days walking through the same inhospitable mountains of the Darien Gap.
Figueroa said anything would be better than staying in Mexico.
“It’s like giving up everything after everything that happened to us,” he said. “But after trying to meet, and it happens, we’ve given up.”
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Clement reported from Tapachula, Mexico. Janetsky reported from Itotonilco de Tula and Mexico City.
