Lobos Guzmán arrived in Juárez with her 33-years-old daughter 10 months ago after her daughter faced death threats from criminal groups in Chiapas, Mexico. This was the second time she had to flee for her life in the last 20 years, leaving her home country of Guatemala in 2006 because of threats before settling in the town of Mapastepec in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
She hopes to get the chance to find security in the United States.
“I cannot return to my country, I lived through something unpleasant there,” Lobos Guzmán said. “And now in Chiapas, a beautiful place, and where I thought I would be buried. But now it is the same situation.”
Every day since she arrived, Lobos Guzmán has applied for an appointment to request asylum in the United States through the CBP One application. Now she worries that the Trump administration will close the application, which has become the only means to legally request asylum.
President-elect Trump has stated on several occasions that he will shut down the CBP One application upon taking office on Monday, Jan. 20. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump condemned the application, saying that it was a tool to smuggle people into the United States.
“As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump tweeted on X. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America. #MAGA2024!”
CBP One was launched in January 2023 to provide migrants with a way to receive a screening interview to petition for asylum at ports of entry at the United States border with Mexico. There are 1,450 appointments granted each day across the entire southern border.
The Biden administration launched the application at a time when the southern border was experiencing a massive influx of migrants, overwhelming cities like El Paso and other border cities. The application was meant to ease the crisis clogging the asylum process and stop migrants from flooding the border.
Trump, who arrived with his wife Melania and other family members at Dulles International Airport on Saturday, was received with a high ceremonial fireworks show, at his golf club in Virginia outside Washington.
He said the number of orders he will sign after taking office had not yet been determined, but the figure will be “record-setting.”
The president-elect is expected to sign orders undoing many of the policies advanced during President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration.
Some of Trump’s agenda include a mass deportation program.
The expulsion of undocumented migrants will “begin very, very quickly,” Trump told NBC.
“I can’t say which cities because things are evolving. And I don’t think we want to say what city. You’ll see it firsthand,” he said in the phone interview.
Hardline immigration official Tom Homan, whom Trump has named his “border czar,” told The Washington Post Saturday that the incoming administration was rethinking its initial moves following media leaks.
Multiple US outlets had reported the Trump administration planned a major raid in Chicago on Tuesday.
Trump’s team “hasn’t made a decision yet,” Homan told the paper.
“We’re looking at this leak and will make a decision based on this leak.”
Homan added that he did not know why Chicago had become the focus of media reports but that the new administration will arrest people they deem “public safety threats” from “day one.”
“We’ll be arresting people across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines,” he said.
Recent inaugurations have been held on the steps of the US Capitol overlooking the National Mall, but Trump announced Friday the ceremony was moving indoors because of unusually cold weather forecast to hit Washington.
“I think we made the right decision,” he told NBC. “The weather was really looking bad in terms of the coldness, and I think it would have been dangerous for a lot of people.”
Following Saturday’s private party, Trump is expected to lay a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery on Sunday before attending a rally of his supporters in Washington.