By Lizbeth Diaz, Laura Gottesdiener and Alexandra Ulmer
TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Nidia Montenegro fled violence and poverty at home in Venezuela, survived a kidnapping as she traveled north into Mexico, and made it to the border city of Tijuana on Sunday for a U.S. asylum appointment that would finally reunite her with her son living in New York.
That appointment is now canceled.
As President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, migrants waiting in Mexico nervously checked the U.S. government app known as CBP One, by which many have been able to schedule appointments to claim asylum. As they refreshed the app, an alert came through: "Existing appointments scheduled through CBP One are no longer valid.”
Shock swept through the shelter in Tijuana, just yards from the border.
"I can't believe it," said Montenegro, 52, tears running down her cheek. "No, God, no."
U.S. border authorities confirmed they had shut down the app and canceled existing appointments.
Montenegro is among thousands of migrants who had their hopes of legally reaching the U.S. dashed suddenly in the days and weeks before their appointments.
Around her, other migrants cried as they repeatedly tried to load the app, despair rising. Some received emails cancelling their appointments, others got the alert, and some just couldn't open the app at all.
The move represents one of the earliest changes brought by the Trump administration as the president vowed in his inaugural address to send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, ramp up deportations, and designate criminal cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Reuters has followed Montenegro's journey for two months, from the excitement as she secured an appointment for Wednesday, Jan 22 - just two days after Trump took office - to the disappointment as it was erased.
Elsewhere along the border there were similar scenes.
In Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, several migrants with CBP One appointments scheduled for later on Monday received notice they had been canceled.
“It’s over, they eliminated it,” said Margelis Tinoco, from Colombia, who traveled with her husband and son. “They blocked it," she told her thirteen-year-old son. "There’s nothing we can do.”
In Piedras Negras, opposite Texas' Eagle Pass, migrants with appointments were being turned away. They clutched backpacks and blankets as they rested against a wall, trying to figure out what to do next. Some sent tearful voice messages to family back home.
For Montenegro, it's a crushing turnaround. She arrived in Tijuana on Sunday full of optimism and excited to join her 24-year-old son in New York who she last saw over a year ago. "Today my life starts again," she told Reuters then, full of smiles.
Last year she was kidnapped along with two nephews and dozens of others, including children, on the day she arrived in southern Mexico from Guatemala. Two days later, the group managed to escape but she has carried the trauma of the incident since.
Now she does not know what to do, stranded in a foreign city thousands of miles from home and almost within touching distance of the country where she had hoped to make a new life.
Still in shock, she can't let go of the hope she has been carrying ever since her appointment was confirmed. Even as she hears of others who are being turned away from the border, she insists: "I will go to my appointment."
(This story has been refiled to fix the name of the town to Piedras Negras, not Piedras Negro, in the signoff)