It’s been almost a week since scores of asylum seekers who entered the U.S. under the CBP One app were told they had seven days to leave the country. Some 900,000 people have had appointments through the Biden-era program since its January 2023 launch.
President Donald Trump ended the program moments after entering office on Jan. 20. But before that, asylum seekers had to download the smartphone app and wait months or even more than a year to get one of a fixed number of CBP One appointments available daily at some border crossings.
It’s a wait Wendy Lopez knows well.
She says years ago, she fled El Salvador after gang members who were targeting her family attacked her while she was headed to university one day. She and her husband have been trying to get asylum in the U.S. off and on for almost a decade. Last October, after a grueling court process, they won. Lopez felt a surge of relief.
“Because I know that it’s almost impossible for most people to win asylum here,” she said in Spanish. “I felt like the luckiest woman.”
The couple and their two kids entered the U.S. through CBP One in the fall of 2023 after almost seven months of trying to secure an appointment. They began working on their asylum case with a lawyer in Tucson.
But less than a month after they won their case at the end of last year, the government appealed that decision.
“Imagine, feeling all this joy and just days later, they don’t tell you no, but that they don’t agree,” she said. “And you have to go back to the same thing of not knowing what's going to happen or having a definitive answer.”
Less than a week ago, they received an email from the Department of Homeland Security in English. Lopez and her husband sat down together to translate it. It said their status had been revoked. And they had seven days to leave the U.S.
“I felt something so ugly in my chest, a horrible worry,” she said.
Now, she says, she feels confused. On one hand, they’re supposed to wait to hear more about their asylum case. But this letter is telling them to leave.
Dora Rodriguez — an immigrant rights activist in Tucson who leads the group Salvavision — says it’s a calculus a lot of CBP One families in Tucson are making now.
Her phone has been ablaze with messages from people trying to make sense of the notices.
“We have families who said ‘well, I’m just going to hide, because I can’t go back to my home country, I will be killed, so I prefer to hide,’” she said.
Rodriguez says others are so terrified of getting separated from their children, that they’re choosing to leave on their own. A Venezuelan family had just packed and went to Mexico.
“They don’t know how Mexico’s going to treat them, or if they’re going to be in the hands of organized crime,” she said.
CBP One recipients have a temporary status called humanitarian parole. It's a legal pathway to the U.S. that typically provides two years of deportation protection and a work permit. Recipients must apply for another form of relief, like asylum, to stay in the U.S. permanently.
Monica Cordero, adult legal program manager at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, says CBP One recipients who came to the U.S. with CBP One get a notice to appear in court upon entry. It could be years out, but if they have pending court dates, they could risk formal deportation and potential bars from the U.S. — even if they leave voluntarily after receiving these notices.
“According to the law, if they don’t show up for an existing court hearing, the judge has the authority to issue a removal order, a deportation order,” she said.
Cordero says those with active immigration cases cases do have a right to stay in the U.S. while their legal proceedings play out.
“Those individuals have a legal basis to remain in the United States, even if they don't have a parole anymore. So it’s very confusing when they receive these notices and believe that they have to leave immediately,” she said. “They could just be ordered deported by the immigration judge because they didn't show up for the court hearing, and we don't know if the government is actively informing the court about what's going on or trying to terminate the proceedings before the individual leaves the country.”
In the notices sent this month, DHS also asks recipients to report their departure from the U.S. through CBP Home — the former CBP One app that the Trump administration has reformed to focus on self deportation reporting.
DHS hasn’t said how many CBP One users have received notices so far — or what happens to those already in active asylum cases. But a spokesperson said the agency is canceling the status using discretionary authority.
Esther Sung, legal director with the Justice Action Center, says humanitarian parole has been used for almost 70 years by both Democratic and Republican presidents.
“Never before in the history of the parole authority granted to the executive has the president or the executive attempted to engage in mass revocations of individual grants of parole,” Sung said.
She says CBP One is the latest Biden-era parole program to be targeted by the Trump administration. Recipients of another for Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguan and Venezuelans were given 30 days to leave the country last month. That’s on hold right now because of a lawsuit filed by the Justice Action Center and other groups. But Sung says there’s still a lot of questions for individual cases.
“That difficulty and that lack of clarity and the stress and anxiety and fear that that all causes, is a feature and not bug from the perspective of the Trump administration,” she said.
Lopez, the Salvadoran mother, says her family is waiting to hear from their lawyer. But she says some people have suggested she prepare for the worst — things like electing a friend to pick up her kids from school if she and her husband are detained.
“Because anything can happen, right? But it's something that terrifies me — to be separated from my children, especially for something unfair, because I’m doing things right,” she said. “Sometimes this type of situation breaks you and it is very, very complicated, but I say, we must not give up, we must fight for what we want, more than anything for the well-being of our children.”
