This is part of a series of stories about people seeking asylum or refuge in Southern Arizona and the complex, chaotic U.S. immigration system at the center of a humanitarian crisis. Read them all here.
Idalia has been waiting in Nogales, Sonora since last May. She left her hometown, near Sahuayo, Michoacán, a state in central México that has faced violence — kidnappings, killings, extortion — for years.
“It’s really bad,” she says in Spanish after a long pause. “It’s much more intense than what I’m going through here, and this is hard enough.”
In December, she was in Nogales with her 2-year-old son Nico and younger brother and mother. Idalia asked that she be identified by her first name to protect her family.
Despite daily attempts and about seven months of waiting, she has not been able to get an appointment to ask for asylum. She wakes up, feeds her child, and knows that every day she must open her phone. Under new border policies, these are her first steps towards filing an official asylum claim: checking the CBP One Mobile app — the smartphone application that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security updated at the beginning of 2023 to help “streamline the photo capture and scheduling process.”
In Texas, migrants can use the app to present themselves at five ports of entry and two in California. Yet, Nogales is currently the only port of entry out of six on the Arizona-México border where U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials take CBP One appointments. It’s also located in the border patrol’s Tucson sector which has seen the highest number of migrants crossing — 250,611 — in the U.S. from October through January. That’s about 50% more than the Del Rio sector in Texas and nearly 110% more than the San Diego sector in California, the regions with the next largest share of crossings.
Given changes in immigration policy implemented by the Biden administration that incentivize people seeking asylum to use the app, and yet limit the number of crossings each day along the Arizona-México border, hundreds of people seeking asylum are stranded in northern Sonora. The incentives for waiting include offers of a more orderly system and unlike those who cross outside of ports of entry, people who enter via CBP One can quickly receive work permits. The current penalties for crossing the border outside of ports of entry are steep, and many migrants aren’t aware of the harm they could cause to their own claim: namely, not being able to access asylum and only being eligible for lesser forms of protection from deportation.
The dynamic has subjected asylum-seekers to months of waiting, during which some take the desperate step of submitting themselves to human smugglers as they try to reach the United States.
Idalia doesn’t have a choice. She can’t risk taking to the desert with her family. The petite mother with a scar on her chin and a thick braid of hair often breaks into a shy smile.
Idalia’s brother has mental illness and needs near constant supervision. Her son required brain surgery last year, and she’s been struggling to make sure he recovers safely. All of this gave her increased urgency to make sure she keeps her place in line for an asylum appointment.
Idalia’s voice is low, almost a whisper, even when she calls out to the Sonoran woman in charge of the list.
The list: A long catalog of names of people seeking exceptions to using CBP One appointments to begin their asylum claims. The tally is managed by a Nogales, Sonora municipal employee regulating how people seeking asylum are organized as they wait for a chance for appointments with U.S. border officials. Migrants the Sonora city worker moves to the top of the tally are able to jump sometimes months-long waits to meet with border patrol obtained through the CBP One app.
For months, Idalia has waited and watched the list, and the government app, eyeing which one would get her in front of border patrol officials sooner. She tended to her mother, brother and son, trying to keep them safe and together as they waited their turn to turn themselves in and ask for asylum.
Despite the physical and legal obstacles blocking people seeking asylum, there are local community aid groups and individuals seeking to welcome and orient arriving migrants. Staff members and volunteers from Kino Border Initiative, a Nogales-based aid organization that promotes “migration with dignity,” are constantly on the ground in Nogales, assisting people like Idalia.
Idalia was going on seven months waiting in Nogales in December, and says she has no other option.
“Of course, it makes sense” to cross through the desert, she says. “You wait here for half a year and do nothing, or you pay extra and get on the other side. But I can’t risk it with my son.”
Nico, her toddler son, had been feverish, and Idalia didn’t know why. “My mom could never make it,” Idalia says of moving her mother from Nogales through the desert on their own by foot or through a human smuggler.
“Estoy desesperada.” I’m desperate, she says in Spanish. “I’m very scared for my baby. Why won’t his fever go down? What if his brain is bleeding?”
“I’m just trying to cross,” Idalia says. “That’s what I keep praying and hoping for.”
Tangled policies
There are exceptions to CBP One. People seeking asylum may present themselves at a port of entry and be allowed to ask for asylum if they can prove it wasn’t possible to use the app “due to a language barrier, illiteracy, significant technical failure, or other ongoing and serious obstacle.”
Other exceptions include “an acute medical emergency” and “extreme or imminent threat” to life and safety. Experts, however, have criticized the exceptions for being “unduly narrow” and lacking U.S. “government-led procedures for the timely identification and processing of urgent medical and protection cases,” according to research from Human Rights First.
The United Nations estimates that as of the end of 2022, there were nearly 110 million forcibly displaced people in the world. But fleeing one country doesn’t necessarily mean finding safety in another. Those millions of people cross seas, deserts and navigate an increasingly tangled labyrinth of immigration restrictions.
In December, U.S. Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 250,000 people who crossed the U.S.-México border, according to CBP statistics. That’s the highest number on record, surpassing the previous peak of about 224,000 in May 2022, according to a February report by the Pew Research Center.
The Tucson sector, which includes Nogales and stretches from the Yuma County line to the New Mexico State line, covers 262 miles along the border. This region has recently seen the most migrant traffic of the entire U.S. borderlands, according to monthly statistics released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. From October 2023 through January 2024, Tucson sector border patrol agents encountered just more than 250,000 migrants crossing into Arizona, eclipsing the closest second and third sectors of Del Rio in Texas and San Diego in California, with nearly 169,000 and and just more than 120,000 crossings, respectively.
Legal rights for people fleeing violence, persecution or harm in their home country has long been established in U.S. and international law and policies.
The current political shifts – often stemming from partisan rhetoric and campaigning – have made it increasingly difficult for many Arizonans living in a border state to understand how asylum in the U.S. works.
For Idalia, and many others like her and her family, today’s policies mean languishing in a growing logjam. She and others are faced with a choice: withstand the sustained waits at the ports of entry or navigate dangerous deserts and turn themselves in to border patrol agents.
The latter option has appeal: it’s faster, and most of the people turning themselves in along gaps in the border walls sectioning Arizona’s desert are rapidly released. But it comes with its own hazards. Many who cross have to pay a smuggling network. Some have to walk for a dozen miles or more, dealing with the cold, heat or violence and other hazards. Last September, the United Nations International Organization for Migration reported that in 2022 at least 686 migrants died or disappeared along the U.S.-México border, calling it the “world’s deadliest migration land route.”
Political stalemate
For people seeking asylum who make it safely across the border, they may be quickly released, but their options for asylum remain limited.
Christina Asencio is the director of Research and Analysis for Refugee Protection at the organization Human Rights First. She told Arizona Luminaria that President Joe Biden’s restriction on asylum “contradicts both U.S. asylum law and the fundamental right of asylum.”
According to U.S. law, people are allowed to seek asylum no matter where they cross the border, even if they cross without authorization. International law also explicitly makes clear, Asencio said, that asylum seekers are permitted to cross borders to seek protection outside of official pathways.
However, because of a new rule put into place by the Biden administration last May, mirroring Trump-era policies, people crossing the border without authorization outside of a port of entry are now ineligible for asylum.
“The rule is punitive,” Asencio said, “it punishes asylum-seekers.”
In December, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security began working with a group of senators, including Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, to negotiate a deal further limiting the right to seek asylum at the border. Within hours of unveiling the proposed $118 billion package in early February that paired Biden’s support for aid for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies with border enforcement policies, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, in concert with many other Republicans and some Democrats, called it “dead on arrival.”
More recently, a group of bipartisan congressional leaders have floated the possibility of a southern border security bill that would renew the authority of U.S. immigration officials to automatically expel people seeking entry from México, raising the threshold for achieving asylum, and expanding immigration detention. More than a month of intense congressional negotiations have yet to produce any comprehensive border legislation.
Stranded in México
Idalia says she had been treating her toddler son’s fevers with over-the-counter medication. It’s helping, but if she doesn’t give Nico medicine for a day, his temperature keeps creeping back up. She is worried that it had to do with the brain surgery he had had a few months prior.
Short on funds, and desperate to get over the border — heading hopefully to Chicago to stay with her brother — she keeps trying her luck every day at the port of entry.
Idalia, Nico and her mom and brother had been staying in a two-room apartment with another family of seven — 11 people crammed into two small rooms. Except for a little bit of shopping and coming to the port-of-entry, for eight months that apartment has been Idalia and Nico’s whole world.
There’s a similar reality for many people seeking asylum. Half a dozen others waiting in Northern México shared their experiences with Arizona Luminaria. For fear of being recognized as migrants — they’ve heard the stories, and some of them have been victims of violence themselves — they hunker down and keep a low profile in Nogales. Even Mexicans fear being recognized as outsiders. Indigenous people from Southern México especially stand out for their different cultures and languages — turning them into potential targets.
In November 2023, Human Rights First counted at least 1,300 people who reported accounts of “torture, kidnapping, rape, extortion, and other violent attacks on asylum seekers and migrants stranded in Mexico.”
Asencio, the director with Human Rights First, said that the situation at ports of entry like Nogales where the smartphone app is used is particularly hard on certain groups: those who can’t access CBP One because of technological or language barriers. The app is only available in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
The reality at ports of entry is also particularly hard on Mexicans, Asencio said. Mexican people seeking asylum, fleeing insecurity in their own country — often linked with state persecution or lack of state protection, Asencio explained — are forced to disclose their name and personal information to a Mexican public authority.
“It’s baffling, and it goes against the core tenets of refugee protection,” she said.
Idalia says she avoided speaking with any of the customs and border patrol officers.
“I’m scared about losing my place if I ask them any questions,” she says.
She had written repeatedly to the email address CBP One@cbp.dhs.gov, and showed Arizona Luminaria at least 10 emails seeking help. One subject line was “solicitud de cita urgente,” or in English: “request for an urgent appointment.” She says she hasn’t received any responses.
So every morning she shows up at the port of entry at 7 a.m. An hour or so later, she tries her luck at securing an appointment via the app.
“I don’t know why it’s taking so long,” she says.
People left in legal limbo
About 2.4 million people have been released into the country at the U.S. southern border from fiscal year 2021 through the end of fiscal year 2023 — that includes both people who cross at ports of entry and between them, according to 2023 statistics from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to a December 2023 report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, commonly referred to as TRAC, the immigration court backlog reached more than 3 million people at the end of November 2023, up from 2 million last November.
John Modlin, chief patrol agent of the Tucson Sector of border patrol, spoke to Arizona Luminaria on Feb. 26. He said that he and probably all other sector chiefs wanted recently proposed border bills to pass.
In early February, the National Border Patrol Council — which represents about 18,000 agents and has been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of immigration issues — endorsed the failed bipartisan border security bill. Touting provisions to remove single adults without a “lengthy judicial review,” Council President Brandon Judd issued a statement saying, “This alone will drop illegal border crossings nationwide and will allow our agents to get back to detecting and apprehending those who want to cross our borders illegally and evade apprehension.”
Modlin said there’s support for measures to further fund the border patrol and add more agents to address the surge in people at the southern border. However, he warned that adding more agents is not a quick fix to the broader broken U.S. immigration system.
“The challenge is the rest of the system is not nearly as robust as we are,” Modlin said. “There’s not enough immigration judges, there’s not enough asylum officers, there’s not enough bed space to hold people, there’s not enough of all these other things. And that’s what’s causing the problem with the system.”
Adding capacity to one part of the system without doing so to the entire system will create other problems, he said.
“You may move the bottleneck further down, but eventually it’s going to bottleneck again somewhere else,” Modlin said.
While politicians at city, county, state, and federal levels struggle at unclogging the system, many migrants are left in a legal limbo.
Idalia, meanwhile, is planning for her turn. “I know I just need to tell the truth,” she says, referring to when she’ll finally be able to levy her asylum claim. “I will tell them what happened, why we had to leave.”
As Idalia waited on a cool morning in December, Ciria Campoy, an aide to the mayor of Nogales, Sonora arrived. Campoy says she manages the list of people waiting to ask for asylum at the port of entry. About 60 people huddled outside the main entrance to the port of entry — made way for her, parting and then closing in again. Campoy carried a small notebook and a plastic, blue-capped pen, as well as her cellphone.
She began by pronouncing that, starting the following day, she would allow only three families to remain inside the port building. “Don’t put yourself at risk,” she said in Spanish, explaining that people should not hang around outside the port either.
“Yesterday, someone was waving around a gun right out there,” she said.
Campoy said she’s going to bring some order to the process: it will be first-come, first-served, with exceptions for people with urgent needs. She asked one man, hunched on a low stack of cushions against the wall, how long he’s been waiting. “Two months sitting right here,” he said.
As Campoy spoke, a toddler started fussing, distracting a few of the people gathered around. To the boy’s delight, his father snatched him up and propped him onto his shoulders. Another toddler saw the newly perched boy and tugged at his mom for the same.
Campoy told the crowd that there’s been corruption in the management of the Nogales list. Weeks earlier she had appointed a man named Fabian to help. But Campoy said that she had only told him to report to her who was present at the port, not to assign places in line. She said that Fabian had wrongly charged up to 15,000 pesos, or nearly $900 dollars, to put a family at the head of the line.
“Nobody is in charge but me,” she said. “I’m the first, second, and third. If someone else comes and says they’re helping, don’t believe them. It’s only me.”
There is one exception: volunteers with Kino Border Initiative, she said. Campoy pointed to Pedro De Velasco, Kino’s director of education and advocacy, who was standing amid the crowd.
Campoy then began rearranging the line, starting with the people who have been there the longest, and then the people she deemed most vulnerable.
Campoy pointed at Idalia: “You, the woman with the child in surgery.”
She told Idalia she could stay in line.
She then called out, looking for the “kid with the pregnant wife.”
That kid was Jesús, 20 years old, from the Mexican state of Guerrero. His wife was eight months pregnant. Jesús told Arizona Luminaria he’d been trying the CBP One app for an appointment for five months. For the past two months, he’s been coming to the port every day to wait in line. “I’m nervous, but excited,” he said of crossing the border.
Campoy arranged the first five families and then read out names from her list, and then rearranged them. A couple people protested, explaining why they should be prioritized. She pointed to Idalia, and said she had two spots: one for her son and one for her.
Campoy then repeated that everyone else besides those she had just named must wait outside the port of entry in Nogales. She told people to take photos of the person in front of them and behind them to remember where they were in line.
Idalia began to protest, but her voice was drowned out by other people seeking Campoy’s attention. Besides the five appointed families, about 40 people remained hovering. The rest followed Campoy out, trailing her with entreaties and objections.
Idalia’s protest, which Campoy hadn’t seemed to have heard, was about her brother and mother. If Idalia was only given two spots — for her and her son — that would mean she would have to leave her family behind.
Cutting in line
Later that same December morning, De Velasco sat at his desk at Kino Border Initiative’s offices and said that, as he sees it, Campoy is indirectly encouraging people to find her and tell her their story.
“Because people learn that if you explain that your little kid had a surgery, or that you’re a single mom and you have no one, she will cut you in line,” he said.
De Velasco called the set up “a vulnerability contest and she” — Campoy — “is the judge.”
“It is totally a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability,” De Velasco said of the management of the list. “It’s not only like one agency that is running the list, it’s just one woman running the list.”
When Arizona Luminaria asked Campoy for a response in December in Nogales to De Velasco’s statements, she explained that she had already discussed her work with the reporter. “We’re doing the best we can and I’m following my directive,” she said.
The list that Campoy is managing in Nogales under the Biden administration’s policies making people wait in México is a violation of U.S. law, according to a 2021 ruling in federal court. That ruling prohibited what is frequently called “metering” or “queue management” — regulating by a list who is allowed to approach a port to ask for asylum, and when they are allowed to do so.
Campoy told Arizona Luminaria in a follow-up January phone interview that she is doing the best she can to bring fairness to the situation at the Nogales border.
“We try to bring order to the waiting,” she said, adding that there were about 5,000 people currently on her list. She said she keeps organized using an Excel spreadsheet in her office and tries to prioritize especially vulnerable people.
Idalia told Arizona Luminaria she was grateful she and her son were not waiting at the back of the line, but she was scared to plead with Campoy to let her mother and brother cross with her as well.
No other option
Yael Schacher is the director for Americas and Europe for Refugees International and has done extensive research about asylum law and processes, including in Arizona and Sonora. She told Arizona Luminaria that it’s unlikely U.S. officials could stop Campoy from managing people seeking asylum according to her perceptions of who is most vulnerable.
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy to hold U.S. officials accountable for things that Mexican nationals do to migrants on Mexican soil,” said Schacher, who holds a doctorate in American Studies from Harvard University. “Accountability would have to come from activists both in the United States and in Mexico.”
De Velasco and others say that it’s common for organized crime to approach people awaiting asylum with offers — either to take them to the desert for a fee or get them ahead in line. Two people, neither of whom wanted to be named for fear of compromising their asylum claims, told Arizona Luminaria the prices they had been quoted for getting out into the desert and then over the border: $1,000 and $1,200.
Idalia can’t take to the desert. Not with her sick child. Her only option was to wait it out in Nogales. But Idalia says she empathizes with those forced into the Arizona desert. “We help each other out, keep up spirits,” she says. “We’re in solidarity with each other.”
She calls them “hermanos de dolor” or “brothers in pain.”
A couple days after Campoy granted her an exception — a higher place in line — but only for her and her son, Idalia sends WhatsApp messages to Arizona Luminaria.
“They haven’t stopped crying,” she writes of her mother and brother.
After a brief pause, she sends another message: “They think I’m abandoning them, but I don’t have any other option.”
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