A Report From Limbo: Asylum Seekers Face the New Trump Era

There’s something spectacular about seeing the face of a newborn. Maybe this is partly because of some personal nostalgia, a reminder of when I first held my own kids in my arms. But there’s more. Perhaps in the case of Valentina, the baby I was about to meet, it was because she was born in a shelter for migrants, far away from her parents’ home in Guerrero. Or perhaps it was because she represented hope; at least that’s what her father, José, told me a week ago during my interview with him at the Casa de la Misericordia y de Todas las Naciones, located in Nogales, Sonora. Since 2020, the Casa has housed asylum seekers, who can stay for months as they go through the long bureaucratic process to get a hearing with the U.S. government. When I finished the interview with José in one of the shelter’s dormitories, where he and his family had been staying for almost a year, he asked me if I wanted to see Valentina, who was born February 4. She was the first newborn at the shelter since Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I had come to the border that day because I was curious about the aftermath of the Trump inauguration from the perspective of the Mexican side of the border. The Casa is located on the far southeastern edge of the city, and it took us nearly 40 minutes to get there through heavy traffic from the international boundary line. I came with Pastor Randy Mayer, of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in southern Arizona, who brings food to the shelter every week. From the vantage point of the window, the border city of nearly 400,000 people—and 100 maquiladoras—seemed to grind on as usual. When I later interviewed José, he told me that he had worked at one of those maquilas for a month when they first arrived, a U.S. aerospace company called Carlisle that made wiring cables for airplanes. José said he and his family initially “didn’t think we were going to come here,” and it became a serious option only after the death threats got intense. José had been working for the Mexican military in Veracruz when a criminal group (“malandros” was the word he used in Spanish) tried to recruit him. He returned to the small farming community in Guerrero where he was grew up, thinking that the change in location would solve the problem. But the threats from the malandros kept coming. They called his wife, Graciela, and told her that if José didn’t work with them (what they wanted him to do specifically, José didn’t reveal), they were going to come for the family. When José, Graciela, and at the time their three children came to Nogales, they ran into the border and its difficult, cumbersome asylum system. After struggling to make ends meet while working at the maquila and renting an apartment, the family came to live at the Casa.

As we drove across town, we passed the tent encampment recently built on a sports complex by the Mexican government to receive deportees, through a program called México Te Abraza. This shelter was mostly empty, according to Sister Alma Angélica Macías Mejía, the director of the Casa de la Misericordia. The day before, there had been seven deportations, she told me—information she got from Mexican immigration. Daily deportations were way down from the year before, when there were at least 100 a day, with numbers sometimes spiking to 600 or 700, Macías Mejía told me. “Entre el dicho y el hecho hay mucho trecho,” she said, referring to Trump’s bravado as “all talk no action,” before reminding me how many deportations happened under Democratic presidents like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. But when I asked, she agreed that this could change quickly, especially as a $175 billion border and immigration enforcement package made its way through the U.S. Congress.

I also did not see an increased presence of military, which I expected after Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum announced the deployment of 10,000 troops to the border, though I saw Guardia Nacional soldiers in desert camo at the ports of entry. When we arrived to the Casa, Macías Mejía made clear that the biggest impact since the inauguration was neither the deployment of additional troops nor the arrival of thousands of deportees. By far the biggest issue was a bureaucratic one: the cancellation of the CBP One app.

Not that the app was great, but it was the only way asylum seekers had to get an appointment. And it took a long time to get an appointment, usually 10 months, if not more. Longer—José mentioned—than it takes for a baby to enter and leave the womb. José’s family applied every single day (you have to do it separately for each member of your family), and they never received an appointment, even as the death threats loomed. There were many problems with the app; for example, it would give you only one minute to fill in your information, including taking or scanning photos of all the applicants, before the window closed.

When Trump took office on January 20, José and his family had been at the shelter for nine months, as had many of the other 120 or so people staying there. At 10 a.m. that day, Macías Mejía said she was out in front of the parking lot in front of the main office of the Casa when a woman approached her and said that her phone wasn’t working. She couldn’t get in to see her appointment. Then another person arrived with the same problem. Then came the avalanche. Another woman came with tears in her eyes. She was the encargada (head) of the kitchen. She said, “Madre, they canceled my appointment.” Macías Mejía said, “What?” “I received an email that said they canceled my appointment.” The loss of an appointment after months and months of waiting, months and months of dealing with a frustrating app, months and months living in a place you don’t know, with little to no money, with an uncertain future—to lose that appointment was crushing. There were four families, 15 people, with appointments on January 21, 22, 24, and 28. Macías Mejía knew the exact dates. There were others with appointments in February and March.

People started arriving from all the corners of the shelter, which is a complex with many buildings and dormitories. “You could see the burdens they were carrying on their bodies,” Macías Mejía said, describing people trudging up the hill.

“It was as if they were carrying a dead loved one,” she said. “It was as if people’s hopes died right there.”

A spontaneous meeting took place with the 120 people who were staying at the Casa, by the large wood-burning oven outside the comedor, the shelter’s cafeteria. Macías Mejía said she didn’t know what to do. But she knew they needed a place to process what was going on. “We aren’t the problem,” Macías Mejía remembered saying to everyone. She told me it was necessary to see the problem from a distance, but it was difficult because the situation was so intense.

“The tempest is not always here,” Macías Mejía said, trying to cultivate hope. “After the storm comes the calm. And the rainbow. The colors of life.” She told me it was significant that they met by the oven. There was something about the oven. It was where people from all over the planet who stayed at the Casa baked the bread of their heritage. It was also a place designed to warm things up, warm each other up. It was a place to settle down. “And we weren’t going to make any decisions,” she said. “In difficult moments, you don’t move, you wait for things to settle. And only then would decisions be made.”

During my interview with José, I asked him how things were going with their newborn. His face relaxed. “In reality,” he said, “the child took away the anxiety we were feeling. Instead, there was an intense feeling of happiness. Our problems, at least for a little bit, evaporated.”

Then he asked me, “Do you want to see her?” I felt honored.

As we walked down the hall, I thought about how José’s family didn’t lose their appointment, because they never had one to begin with. And now, after the CBP One cancellation, there was no longer any way for them to apply. Trump said he was going to reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols(Remain in Mexico), but that still hadn’t happened. Between 30 and 40 people left. According to Macías Mejía, many were prepared to come back if necessary. One family went to Ciudad Juárez, to be closer to their son who was in Texas. Others went to find work to pay off their debts, often loans to make the trip north. Lawyers told the people whose appointments were canceled to make sure they had proof. If rights groups succeed in appealingTrump’s executive order, things might move fast, even from day to night.

José stopped in front of the closed door of their room and told his wife, Graciela, that we were about to enter. At first it felt a little strange going into their room, their space. But this feeling quickly dissipated when Graciela walked toward me beaming, Valentina swaddled in her arms. There were several bunk beds around the small room, where I imagined the family had been sleeping since April. Graciela removed the blanket, revealing Valentina’s soft, vulnerable face, her eyes squinting in from the streaming sunshine coming through the window, and her remarkable head of wild black hair. I looked up from Valentina to José, who was beaming now as well. After I left, and contemplated the day, and what was happening on the border, what I kept remembering was simply Valentina’s face. Maybe nothing better explained what was really going on.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicles.