If President Donald Trump’s plan is to make the United States a wholly unwelcoming place for refuge, it may be working.
More than six months after leaving her home in Venezuela, passing through the dangerous Darién Gap and up through Central America before reaching Mexico, Yojani had hoped to seek asylum in the U.S.
But after Mr. Trump shut down one of the only viable ways for her family to do so his first day in office, Yojani and her husband have decided that the U.S. is no longer a land of stability or security.
Why We Wrote This
After President Donald Trump won a second term, the Monitor spoke with parents around the world about their hopes and fears for the future. Here we catch up with one parent – a Venezuelan mother – who made her way to Mexico, but is now preparing a reverse trek south.
“The U.S. has become hell for immigrants,” says the young mother, watching as her two children play with other migrants – from Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador – on the patio of a Catholic church in Mexico City’s historic center.
The Christian Science Monitor first spoke with Yojani, whose full name we aren’t publishing for her security, back in November after Mr. Trump clinched a second term in office. She was one of many parents around the world – from Israel to Russia to Gaza to China – who were calculating the risks that might come with a second Trump presidency. Not all parents were uniformly anti-Trump. Some hoped his administration would spell peace for Palestinians or Ukrainians. Many others, particularly Latin Americans worried about his anti-migrant campaign pledges, expressed concern over potentially rash geopolitical decision-making that might earn him political points but that could upend their lives.
Yojani’s fears turned into reality on Jan. 20.
Today she’s still sleeping in a tent camp outside a Mexico City church along with families who have also waited for months – some for more than a year – for a chance to ask for asylum in the U.S.
They were almost all seeking an appointment with immigration officials through the country’s now-defunct CBP One app. CBP One, though imperfect, was one of the last formal pathways to meeting with officials to request parole or asylum at the U.S. southern border. The app’s abrupt end two weeks ago was the first tangible evidence of a nation turning its back on refugees under this administration.
Yojani refreshed the CBP One app five times that day before crumbling into a heap of tears.
“Trump’s proposals may work in the short run” to drive immigrants out of and away from the U.S., says Brad Jones, a professor at the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis. But there will be long-term costs, he says, such as the U.S. losing its international “reputation as a beacon of liberty and safety.” And historians have already learned from the past “that drastic and restrictive immigration policies” only end up making it harder, pricier, or more dangerous for people to leave home – not impossible.
“The reasons people are fleeing aren’t going to go away,” Dr. Jones says.
For now, Yojani’s family is turning its gaze southward. Her husband went to the Colombian Embassy in Mexico City in late January to ask about the possibility of being repatriated there. Their daughter, age 2, is a Colombian citizen, something they hoped would qualify them for a flight there. He was turned away.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose unfounded claims of winning reelection last summer served as the final impetus pushing Yojani’s family out of a country where lawlessness and poverty have soared, has not been accepting any deportation flights. President Trump announced over the weekend that Mr. Maduro would start accepting migrants home, but Venezuela has not confirmed the reversal.
Yojani now plans to find a bus to Costa Rica and try to get to Colombia from there.
Not every migrant in Mexico is deciding to give up on an American dream. They insist they will make it to the U.S. no matter what President Trump does or says. Hannah Postel, assistant professor of public policy at Duke University, says Americans could soon find out that labor shortages, typically filled by lower-wage immigrants now shut out of the U.S., could drive up costs.
As the U.S. has turned its back on migrants, Yojani is turning her back, literally, on America as she prepares a reverse, southward journey. “I feel like my wings have been clipped,” she says. But, she adds, it’s not the end of her story – being a mother necessitates walking the path ahead, wherever that may lead.
