MEXICO CITY (CN) — In January, 23-year-old Jean Carlos fled Venezuela with his wife Diana Carolina and their two children.
The family is now among hundreds of migrants seeking refuge at Church of La Soledad in the La Merced neighborhood of downtown Mexico City.
Cots in the church filled up quickly, and its outside plaza has become a makeshift migrant camp filled with tents and wood-fire stoves. This neighborhood — where many South American migrants arrive by bus — isn’t the safest, either. It’s long had a reputation for vice and illicit trade, a place where people have to fight to survive.
Many in this plaza, including the Carlos family, are waiting on digital appointments on CBP One. U.S. Customs and Border Protection launched the app in October 2020 to provide mobile access to some of the agency's functions.
Following the lifting of Title 42, a Trump-era public health measure that automatically expelled most migrants and put a temporary end to new asylum claims, CBP expanded the app to process asylum appointments. Through it, migrants learn which of eight border ports of entry that use CBP One will be processing their asylum request. If migrants can prove credible fear of returning to their home country, CBP will allow their entry into the U.S.
But with the app marred by long wait times and other issues, critics say it's putting migrants in a dangerous limbo. In a 68-page report this month, Human Rights Watch said the app “feeds cartel needs for a vulnerable population to prey upon.”
"Previously, asylum-seekers would stay at shelters for short periods of time — often only a matter of days,” the report said. “They now spend much longer waiting for a CBP One appointment, creating a greater need for services like medical and psychological care.”
In an interview on May 6, the Carlos family had already been waiting on their CBP One appointment for more than 20 days. Everyone in the plaza is waiting, Diana Carolina said.
It had been a harrowing journey. The family first made it through Colombia, then through the Darién Gap in Panama. In the gap — infamous for its rainforests and rugged terrain — Jean Carlos said he saw entire families drowned in rivers or dead at the bottom of canyons and ravines.
Carlos has tried finding steady work around the plaza, but the pay is scant and he says employers take advantage of migrants’ desperation. He found a job at a nearby food stall, but on top of the bribes paid to keep the job, the pay was so little that he walked away with almost nothing.
In the end, Carlos decided work wasn’t worth the trade-offs. In particular, he fears what might happen to his children while he’s gone.
“I have heard of kidnappings on the way towards the border,” Carlos said. “They'll take you and make you or your family pay to be released.” If that happened, he wasn’t sure if or how he could get his children back. "I have no money,” he said. “I have no family that can help me."
Life in the plaza was dangerous and degrading in other ways. "The Mexican people tell us we're not supposed to be here, to go back home," Diana Carolina said one afternoon as she watched over one of her children in the plaza.
"They charge us one dollar to charge our phones at the store every time we need to charge it,” she said. “The locals around the neighborhood get mad at us for using the internet, but it's a public plaza. And the internet doesn't work most of the time anyway, so we have to buy data for our phones."
