By Alexandra Ulmer
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico (Reuters) – Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president on Monday, Honduran migrant Denia Mendez’s phone started buzzing with news that the app she had used to book her U.S. asylum appointment was down.
Afraid of what this meant for her long-awaited appointment on Jan. 21, Mendez, sitting in the patio of a migrant shelter in the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras, called her teenage daughter Sofia who had the CBP One appointment app on her phone.
“Bring me the phone now, quickly,” Mendez told Sofia, who was upstairs in the shelter. “Run, run!”
For Mendez, a 32-year-old single mom, the Jan. 21 asylum appointment had been a full, fraught year in the making.
She recounted a harrowing tale from Jan. 1, 2024, when a gang member in Honduras demanded a fortnightly payment of some $120 from the proceeds of her small Tupperware business. Unable to meet the demand, Mendez said she pleaded for two months to get the money. Five days later, another gang member came with the same demand.
“He told me: you get warned twice. The third time we won’t be talking,” Mendez said.
Fearing for her life, she fled that night with her daughter Sofia, now 15, and son Isai, now 13. She left without saying goodbye to anyone to avoid the risk of being denounced.
Over the course of a week, Mendez made her way to Monterrey, Mexico, with the help of money sent by a brother in Maryland.
In Monterrey, she found work packing tortillas, working eight-hour shifts a day. She changed phones and abandoned her Facebook account as she said she kept receiving threatening messages from the gang members in Honduras.
Mendez, who was orphaned as a toddler and left school at eight to help her grandmother sell cakes and tamales in the street, wanted her children to continue their education.
But Mendez said she was turned away from two schools in Monterrey and was not allowed to speak to the principals. She suspects she was the subject of discrimination.
For a year, Mendez said she logged into the CBP One app daily, hoping for an appointment to make her case for U.S. asylum. Her persistence paid off on Jan. 2, 2025, when she finally got an appointment for Jan. 21.
“I was so happy,” Mendez said. “But at the same time, I was a little nervous, because supposedly on Jan. 20 they were going to close things down.”
Trump, a Republican, won a second term at the White House after promising to intensify border security and deport record numbers of migrants. He vowed to also shut the CBP One entry program, which had allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the U.S. legally by scheduling an appointment on an app.
Still, Mendez made her way to Piedras Negras on Saturday, hoping she would be allowed through to the United States.
For around two days at the border, she was so nervous that she struggled to eat anything. She avoided any TikTok videos that said Trump was going to cancel the appointments.
On Sunday, the eve of Trump’s inauguration, she and her family went to church to pray.
“I asked God to soften the president’s heart,” Mendez said.
‘SNOWSTORM … COME TO FREEZE OUR HEART’
Sofia, her lips red from candy, came down with the phone and immediately tried to log into the CBP One app.
Mendez had meanwhile just checked her inbox on her own phone and was staring at an email for several minutes. She read it over and over, before her eyes welled up.
“They canceled my appointment,” she said.
A handful of other migrant women, who just minutes before were laughing as they fed potato chips to pigeons, huddled around her phone, their faces suddenly stricken.
Turning to Sofia, Mendez said softly, “They’re not going to let you into the app, baby.”
Mendez called her brother Dennis in Maryland and read the email out to him. “Tell me: What do I do?”
Her brother said he wasn’t sure he would be able to send her more money as his construction work was slow.
Mendez said she only had some $10 left in her pocket and while she didn’t think her old job in Monterrey would still be available, returning to Honduras was out of the question.
She made her way to the shelter’s dormitory and sat on a mattress, legs under a blanket amid a major cold spell.
“We were one day away,” Mendez said in disbelief as she talked through her options with other migrants, many Venezuelans.
One migrant quoted a Spanish proverb that roughly translates as: “In the face of bad weather, put on a good face.”
“But this isn’t bad weather,” Mendez responded. “This is a snowstorm that has come to freeze our heart and bones.”
Mendez kept sitting still on the mattress and stared ahead, her eyes occasionally tearing up.
Her son Isai, who wants to become a psychologist, did some push-ups. Sofia, who wants to be a veterinarian, wandered downstairs and talked with the other children.
Eventually news drifted in that more migrants would be arriving at the shelter.
Mendez got up.
“Let’s clean the floor before the others get here,” she said, grabbing a broom and mop.
Cleaning, she added, would take her mind off the appointment that never was.
(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; Additional reporting by Cheney Orr in Piedras Negras, Mexico; Editing by Mary Milliken and Himani Sarkar)
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