CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The city center is bustling with music, cars and people walking down the streets, checking out the many street vendors selling tacos, traditional and second-hand clothes, and aguas frescas.
It’s a hot summer Saturday morning, and kids are running around Juárez’s main plaza and the nearby streets.
Yasmelin Velazquez, 35, sits behind a table full of pottery vases in the shape of frogs, skull heads and body parts. Her two kids — ages 3 and 2 — are here with her.
The Venezuelan migrant has been in Mexico for more than eight months after fleeing the country’s dictatorship nearly five years ago.
“It hasn’t been hard, but it’s been stressful,” Velazquez says in Spanish.
Because she wants to protect her kids, she has decided she doesn’t want to cross into the U.S. illegally. She’s decided to stay until she secures an asylum appointment using the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol CBP One app, a platform created by the U.S. government in 2020.
“I’ve been waiting so many months for the appointment, and we see how other migrants show up and they get an appointment right away,” Velazquez said. “And we are still here.”
Like Velazquez, many migrants in Mexico who have made the dangerous trek from Central America and South America, have had to wait months to get an asylum appointment because appointments are being distributed via a lottery system.
The thousands of migrants in this border city face a choice: a long wait for an appointment, or attempt to cross the border illegally.
But since last month, the latter option has become harder.
President Biden issued executive actions severely restricting asylum claims at the border, and migrants who cross are more likely to be removed from the country expeditiously.
Under the new policy, the processing of most asylum claims at the southern U.S. border is suspended when the seven-day average of unauthorized crossings exceeds 2,500. The restriction could be suspended 14 days after the seven-day-average drops to 1,500 per day.
Due to this rule and Mexico’s beefed-up enforcement, unauthorized crossings in June hit the lowest level since President Biden took office in 2021. Immigration observers say migrants traditionally go into a “wait-and-see” period after policies like these go into effect, but crossings tend to eventually go back up.
The Biden administration has encouraged migrants to use the app. Officials claim it’s the safest way to claim asylum.
María Alejandra Amaris, 30, had planned on crossing into the U.S. with her husband and daughter, and turn themselves into Border Patrol and ask for asylum.
Instead, when she got closer to the U.S., she encountered a heavy presence of immigration agents and razor wire lining the border.
So she and her family decided to stay in Ciudad Juárez and continue trying to get an appointment.
“I got an orientation and they told me it was better for my daughter 's future,” she says.
Challenges with the CBP One app
But the app is not a sure bet.
“It’s not as if those CBP One app appointments are necessarily your golden ticket in,” says Carla Angulo-Pasel, who teaches border studies and migration at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. “It basically gives you an appointment to be able to have someone look at, interview you … and give you your notice to appear to get into the system.”
But getting into the country with a CBP One appointment also allows migrants to apply for a temporary work permit, something potentially life-changing for them.
A spokesperson with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection told NPR in a statement that more than 680,000 individuals have successfully scheduled appointments since January of last year. It’s unclear how many of those were allowed into the U.S. CBP would only say they have processed more than 41,800 people with appointments last month.
According to 2023 numbers released by U.S. Rep Mark Green, R-Tenn., the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, 96% of migrants who presented themselves for an appointment from January 2023 to September 2023 were allowed into the country.
But there has not been a spike in registrations since Biden’s actions last month, according to CBP.
In a statement to NPR, Green acknowledges the decrease, adding "but still crisis-level, illegal crossings between ports of entry does not undo the damage already done. More importantly, it does not account for the unprecedented numbers entering through our ports.”
It’s unclear how many people today are registered on the CBP One app. A CBP spokesperson would not provide that number to NPR, despite multiple requests.
“CBP encourages migrants to utilize lawful processes, rather than taking the dangerous journey to cross unlawfully between the ports of entry, which also carries significant consequences under the United States immigration laws,” the spokesperson said.
The majority of the migrants being processed through the app hail from Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti, according to CBP.
But one of the big challenges for migrants is that the app geolocates, and in order to apply for an appointment, they must be within central or northern Mexico.
The number of appointments is very limited; there are only 1,450 appointments a day. It’s a lottery system and a percentage of the appointments — CBP would not release a figure — goes to those migrants waiting for appointments for the longest time.
Migrants can only request appointments from noon to 11:59 p.m. Those who don’t secure an appointment have to try again the next day.
That’s what Emanuel Nava, 25, has been doing since arriving in Mexico a month ago.
“I got here with the intention of crossing and turning myself in because I do need asylum,” Nava said, adding he was fleeing organized crime in his country. “But because it’s not available now, I’ll just stay here and find a job.”
He’s now working in construction in Ciudad Juárez and has been trying to secure an appointment since mid June.
According to CBP, non-Mexican citizens wait an average of eight weeks from the time they register on the app to the time they get an appointment.
But many migrants have waited far longer than that.
Grebi Suárez, a Venezuelan migrant, has been trying for nine months.
“I have faith,” Suárez said. “If other people have gotten an appointment, I will also get one at some point.”
When the CBP One appointment is secured
Suárez has seen people close to him get lucky with an appointment.
He is a barber, and his shop is right behind Velazquez’s pottery stand.
This week, Velazquez traveled over 700 miles by bus to Tijuana, Mexico, to attend her asylum appointment at a port of entry. The trajectory was not easy — in a town near Nogales, Mexico, Velazquez’s bus was stopped by local police. She says the police stole all her money and sexually assaulted her. Her kids were unharmed, she says.
On Wednesday, Velazquez had her appointment. More than 10 hours after she showed up at the port of entry, she was released into the U.S. with parole. This shields Velasquez from deportation for a temporary period of time, until she has to appear in front of an immigration judge.
On Thursday, she told NPR she woke up in a shelter in San Diego and thanked God.
She says the wait was worth it. But she’s told her cousin, who also has kids and is thinking of making the same journey, to reconsider it.
“I’m not selfish — they are my family,” Velazquez said. “I don’t want them to go through the same things I did.”
However, she says if they want to get into the U.S., she’d recommend using the app.
“The best thing is to wait and get an appointment,” Velazquez said. “And go in through the main gate.”
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