TIJUANA, Mexico — As panic sank in, two men strung ladders together with rope and placed them over the steel border wall that separated Tijuana, Mexico, from Southern California.
“Hurry up, hurry keep moving!” shouted the smugglers at the bottom of the ladder. A young girl from Zimbabwe stood on top and looked down with wide eyes, hesitating before taking her next step.
On Monday, people waiting to enter the United States learned that President Donald Trump had canceled all asylum appointments moments after taking office and planned to sign several executive orders sealing the border.
Yet at least one group still made a desperate and perilous last-ditch effort to cross into the United States.
One by one, they ascended the wobbling structure, then slid down the other side. Those who made it over helped catch the women and children. But one woman fell to the ground on her way down and lay wailing in pain, grabbing her leg.
“We do this out of need, not because we want to, and that is it,” said Carlos Porras, 39, from Peru, speaking through the wall slats. He also hurt his ankle while jumping and was limping.
Moments later, the group was approached by U.S. Border Patrol officers and taken away.
The scene revealed the desperation of migrants who on Monday learned that the border was now effectively closed. All were left to process the emotions, from bewilderment to despair.
“I feel rage, I feel sadness, I feel everything,” said Katherine Romero, 36, a Venezuelan who had waited a year in Mexico City for her Monday asylum appointment, working different jobs to save up for the plane ticket to Tijuana. “I just can’t believe it.”
In a series of orders he signed Monday evening, Trump moved to close the nation’s borders to migrants, part of a policy barrage that included broadly blocking asylum-seekers and a national emergency declaration to deploy the military to the border.
His administration shut down the CBP One app just minutes after Trump took the presidential oath Monday. The app was used by the Biden administration to allow migrants to schedule appointments to gain entry into the United States but had been a target of Republicans.
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The program allowed 1,450 people a day to schedule a time to present themselves at a port of entry and request asylum. More than 900,000 entered the country using the app from its launch to the end of 2024.
In a migrant encampment in Mexico City on Monday, Cristian Morillo Romero, a Venezuelan who arrived in Mexico over a year ago, learned that Trump had ended the CBP One program — but he didn’t know what that meant for his Jan. 26 appointment in Calexico, California.
Then he opened his email. There was a message in English with the subject line “CBP One Appointment Canceled” that explained that existing appointments “are no longer valid.”
“I want to cry,” said Morillo Romero, 37. When it finally hit him later in the day, he did.
In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas, only one group of 100 people was allowed to cross into the United States for their early morning appointments. Then, just before 11 a.m., Mexican border officials said they received a notification from their American counterparts: No more appointments were being accepted.
“I’m in shock,” said John Flores Bonalte, 36, a Venezuelan who never got to his 1 p.m. appointment. “It’s unfair. We were waiting to cross legally for a long time. It’s been seven months waiting in Mexico for this appointment.”
José Antonio Zuchite, 40, said he left Honduras in September and waited five months in Mexico City before coming to Ciudad Juárez over the weekend “with a lot of hope.” His appointment Monday was then canceled.
“I don’t have a place to stay,” he said, as his voice cracked. “I don’t have family or acquaintances here. I’m on the street.”
On social media, migrants shared images and videos of themselves, crying or with their heads in their hands, along with captions detailing how long they had been waiting for appointments. Many said they had been biding their time in Mexico. Some said they had waited more than a year.
Many of the videos featured the same clip from a song that had also served in recent years as a sort of anthem for people who finally made it to the United States.
Now many were scrambling. In Tijuana, some people considered staying while praying for some sort of miracle. Others said they were thinking about going to places like Mexico City, where there were more job opportunities. Some said returning to their native countries was out of the question because they were escaping violence or threats.
“Going back to Haiti means going back to death,” said Rose Joseph, 28, who left the country’s violence-torn capital more than two years ago.
In her Monday news conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico strongly urged Trump’s team to replace the CBP One app with another mechanism so that people could again apply for asylum in an orderly way.
“We want something similar to be established, because it has had results,” she said.
The program was a key part of the Biden administration’s effort to gain control over migration through the southern border. U.S. officials at the time believed that by offering migrants an organized way to enter legally through an app, they could discourage unauthorized crossings.
Coupled with Mexico’s hardened restrictions, unlawful crossings dropped markedly in 2024, and officials and analysts say the app was a significant reason.
“That was a massive change,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “It provided more stability and an opportunity to have better control on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, because it made the path of migrants more predictable.”
Critics, though, viewed the program as a way to allow those who otherwise had no legal pathway into the United States to come and remain for years as their immigration cases languished in the courts.
“They made an application to facilitate illegal immigration,” Vice President JD Vance said in a post on the social platform X last week. “It boggles the mind.”
Without a replacement program, migrants stranded in Mexico likely face three scenarios: try to cross illegally into the United States, return to their home countries or apply for asylum in Mexico.
“Maybe it’s not what many migrants would like, but it’s an alternative,” Ruiz Soto said. Still, he added, that would not be of much help for Mexicans seeking to flee their own country. “For them, I don’t see many options.”
Francisco González, a pastor who oversees a network of migrant shelters, including one in Ciudad Juárez, said he expected migrants to stay longer at shelters as they planned their next steps. He worried, he said, that people might now assume more risk by hiring smugglers or members of organized crime to cross the border illegally.
“They’re going to keep trying,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
