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‘Fear and uncertainty’ at the border as Trump’s executive orders take hold

Migrants and asylum seekers watch Trump's inauguration speech at a shelter in Nogales on January 20, 2025.
Alisa Reznick/KJZZ
Migrants and asylum seekers watch Trump's inauguration speech at a shelter in Nogales on January 20, 2025.

President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders on Monday, including several that change how asylum seekers ask for protection in the U.S. and even challenging birthright U.S. citizenship.

From renaming the Gulf of Mexico, to invoking a centuries-old wartime authority, Trump’s first 24 hours were busy.

“I will declare a national emergency at our southern border,” he told the crowd during his recent inauguration speech. “All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

Some of day one’s biggest changes revolved around immigration and asylum.

Kathleen Bush-Johnson with the Migration Policy Institute said it’s clear that the new Trump administration took some time to study its losses for a better potential sell on some measures.

“There's a call for expanding expedited removal, for example, and during the first Trump administration that was allowed to go into effect,” said Bush-Johnson. “They only removed about 17 people that way, but they could potentially expand its use here.”

A border rule that was enacted by President Joe Biden in the summer of 2024 already sends most people apprehended between ports of entry back to Mexico or their home countries through expedited removal. Tens of thousands have been subject to that order so far.

CBP One — the government-run app for asylum seekers at the border — has been abruptly shuttered after a series of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump.

The institute’s director, Doris Meissner, said it’ll take time for bigger moves to come into full view, but there are a few early signs of where the administration’s aiming.

Among the first programs likely to be impacted is one put in place under former President Biden that allows nationals from some countries to apply to stay and work in the U.S. temporarily.

“The incoming Trump administration has said that it will not only cancel any further uses of the humanitarian parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans — but it will not renew,” Meissner said.

Meanwhile, despite another executive order declaring an emergency at the border, Meissner said the new administration is inheriting a time of low crossings.

“Where the southwest border is concerned, the Trump administration is inheriting a stable border with the lowest level of illegal crossings since prior to the Biden administration going back into the final years of the first Trump administration,” she said.

Meissner said the number of people who have been waiting in Mexico in order to cross in orderly ways is significant. Now, she said those orderly ways have been eliminated and replaced with what she described as “continuing and ongoing threats that generate fear and uncertainty that is already at a heightened level, and that will heighten even further.”

Posters explaining how CBP One works for asylum applications were posted at a quiet DeConcini Port of Entry just ahead of the ending of Title 42 on May 11, 2023.
Alisa Reznick/KJZZ
Posters explaining how CBP One works for asylum applications were posted at a quiet DeConcini Port of Entry just ahead of the ending of Title 42 on May 11, 2023.

Roughly 280,000 people in Mexico had hoped to ask for asylum appointments through the CBP One app, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures.

Just across the border in Nogales, Sonora, on Monday morning, at a migrant shelter called Kino Border Initiative, a few dozen people huddled around a wall-mounted TV playing Trump’s inauguration speech. His voice was overdubbed by a newscaster translating his remarks into Spanish.

People come here and other shelters to await asylum appointments through CBP One. A fixed 1,450 appointments happen borderwide through the app daily, including about 100 in Nogales.

That’s why 25-year-old Jeanderlin came here. She, her husband and their toddler arrived in Mexico from Venezuela last fall after more than a month on the road. They crossed several countries and the rugged Darien Gap jungle between Panama and Columbia.

She didn’t want to give her full name because she’s worried about her safety in Mexico.

“I came to Nogales because my appointment was Jan. 16,” she said in Spanish.

That was last Thursday. But, it never happened. She says they were kidnapped en route to Nogales.

“And I wasn’t able to arrive in time for my appointment,” she said.

Volunteers plate up breakfast for several dozen migrants and asylum seekers at the Kino Border Initiative on January 20, 2025.
Alisa Reznick/KJZZ
Volunteers plate up breakfast for several dozen migrants and asylum seekers at the Kino Border Initiative on Jan. 20, 2025.

By the time they did arrive a few days ago, CBP officials told them their appointment was gone. They’d have to reapply. Jeanderlin’s big, brown eyes filled with tears as she talked.

“So many things are going on in my head,” she said. “The truth is that I don’t have an answer about what I’ll do. I can’t think about anything — crossing, moving forward, returning home or not — it all makes me very afraid.”

That was just a few minutes before Trump’s speech. Moments after he finished, a message on Customs and Border Protection’s website declared CBP One was terminated and existing appointments were canceled.

The impact of that change was immediate in Nogales. That afternoon at the DeConcini Port of Entry — where CBP One appointments usually happen in two phases throughout the day — aid volunteer Alejandro Nava, was waiting for asylum seekers to let them know about the change.

“Today feels quite sad,” he said. “We were under the impression, I mean, the rumors were that the CBP One app was going to be eliminated, so we all expected that.”

But, Nava explained, what they didn’t expect was how quickly it happened. They still weren’t sure what was going to happen to asylum seekers with appointments earlier that day. Nava said there were even some asylum seekers whose CBP One appointments were happening during the inauguration, just as the program was getting canceled.

“It looks like there’s a possibility that they’re going to return to Mexico,” Nava said.

Aid groups in Nogales said they expect to see an influx of some several hundred people arriving over the next week who were already en route to appointments.

More Immigration News

Kirsten Dorman is a field correspondent at KJZZ. Born and raised in New Jersey, Dorman fell in love with audio storytelling as a freshman at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2019.
Alisa Reznick is a senior field correspondent covering stories across southern Arizona and the borderlands for the Tucson bureau of KJZZ's Fronteras Desk.