Illegal border crossings hit Biden-era low, migrants face longer waits for entry

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The city center is bustling with music, cars and people walking the streets, watching the many street vendors selling tacos, traditional and second-hand clothing and aguas frescas.

It’s a warm summer Saturday morning and children are running around Juárez’s central square and the nearby streets.

Yasmelin Velazquez, 35, sits behind a table covered in ceramic vases shaped like frogs, skulls and body parts. Her two children — ages 3 and 2 — are 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 wasn’t difficult, but it was stressful,” Velazquez says in Spanish.

In order to protect her children, she has decided that she will not enter the U.S. illegally. She has decided to stay until she can secure an asylum appointment through the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol CBP One app, a platform created by the U.S. government in 2020.

“I’ve been waiting for the appointment for so many months, and we see other migrants showing up and they get an appointment right away,” Velazquez said. “And we’re still here.”

Like Velazquez, many migrants in Mexico who made the perilous journey from Central and South America had to wait months for an asylum application, as applications were distributed through a lottery system.

The thousands of migrants in this border town face a choice: wait a long time for an appointment, or try to cross the border illegally.

But since last month, that last option has become more difficult.

President Biden has taken steps that severely restrict asylum claims at the border and increase the likelihood that migrants who cross the border will be expelled as quickly as possible.

Under the new policy, processing of most asylum claims at the U.S. southern border will be suspended when the seven-day average of unauthorized crossings exceeds 2,500. The restriction can be suspended for 14 days after the seven-day average drops to 1,500 per day.

The rule, coupled with Mexico’s stricter enforcement, pushed unauthorized border crossings in June to their lowest level since President Biden took office in 2021. Immigration observers say migrants traditionally enter a “wait and see” period after such policies take effect, but border crossings eventually pick up again.

The Biden administration has encouraged migrants to use the app, which officials say is the safest way to apply for asylum.

María Alejandra Amaris, 30, planned to cross the border into the U.S. with her husband and daughter and register with Border Patrol and request asylum.

But as she got closer to the US, she was confronted with a large group of immigration agents and barbed wire along the border.

So she and her family decided to stay in Ciudad Juárez and keep trying to get an appointment.

“I had 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 no guarantee.

“It’s not like those CBP One app appointments are necessarily your golden ticket,” said Carla Angulo-Pasel, who teaches border studies and migration at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “It basically gives you an appointment to have someone look at you, interview you … and give you a notice to show up to get into the system.”

But if migrants enter the country with a single CBP appointment, they can also apply for a temporary work permit, which can change their lives.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection told NPR in a statement that more than 680,000 individuals have successfully made appointments since January of last year. It’s unclear how many of those were allowed into the U.S. CBP would say only that it processed more than 41,800 people with appointments last month.

According to 2023 figures released by US Congressman Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, 96% of migrants who presented for an appointment between January 2023 and September 2023 were allowed into the country.

But according to CBP, there has been no spike in registrations since Biden’s action last month.

In a statement to NPR, Green acknowledged the decline, adding, “yet crisis-level, illegal border crossings between ports of entry do not undo the damage that has already been done. And more importantly, it does not account for the unprecedented numbers coming through our ports.”

It’s unclear how many people are registered on the CBP One app today. A CBP spokesperson declined to provide that number to NPR despite multiple requests.

“CBP encourages migrants to use legal processes rather than make the dangerous journey of traveling illegally between border crossings, which also carries significant consequences under U.S. immigration laws,” the spokesperson said.

According to CBP, the majority of migrants processed through the app come from Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti.

However, one of the biggest challenges for migrants is that the app determines the location of their residence. In order to make an appointment, they must be in central or northern Mexico.

The number of appointments is very limited; there are only 1,450 appointments per day. It is a lottery system, and a percentage of the appointments — CBP declined to release numbers — go to migrants who have waited the longest for appointments.

Migrants can only request an appointment from 12:00 to 23:59. People who cannot make an appointment should try again the next day.

That’s what Emanuel Nava, 25, has been doing since he arrived in Mexico a month ago.

“I came here with the intention of crossing and turning myself in, because I need asylum,” Nava said, adding that he was fleeing organized crime in his country. “But since it’s not available now, I’m just going to stay here and look for a job.”

He now works in construction in Ciudad Juárez and has been trying to get an appointment since mid-June.

According to CBP, non-Mexican citizens must wait an average of eight weeks from the time they register on the app to the time they receive an appointment.

But many migrants have waited much longer.

Grebi Suárez, a Venezuelan migrant, has been trying for nine months.

“I have confidence,” Suarez said. “If other people have been given an appointment, at some point I will get one too.”

When the CBP One appointment has been recorded

Suárez has seen that people around him were lucky with an appointment.

He is a barber and his shop is just behind Velazquez’s pottery stall.

This week, Velazquez traveled 700 miles by bus to Tijuana, Mexico, to attend her asylum application at a border crossing. The journey wasn’t easy: In a town near Nogales, Mexico, Velazquez’s bus was stopped by local police. She says the police stole all of her money and sexually assaulted her. Her children, she says, were unharmed.

On Wednesday, Velazquez had her appointment. More than 10 hours after she showed up at the border crossing, she was released into the U.S. on parole. This temporarily protects Velazquez from deportation until she has to appear before an immigration judge.

On Thursday, she told NPR that she woke up in a San Diego shelter and thanked God.

She says the wait was worth it. But she told her cousin, who also has children and is considering making the same trip, to reconsider.

“I’m not selfish — they’re my family,” Velazquez said. “I don’t want them to go through what I did.”

However, she says if they want to go to the US, she would recommend the app.

“The best thing is to wait and make an appointment,” Velazquez said. “And go in through the main entrance.”

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