Edgarlys Castañeda Rodríguez, a slight, delicate-featured twenty-seven-year-old from Venezuela, posted makeup tutorials and dance videos to her few thousand followers on Instagram and TikTok, but it was her posts about politics that tended to go viral. In them, she was open about her opposition to President Nicolás Maduro. In one video, Castañeda talked about how politics had driven a wedge between her and her father, a Maduro supporter. In others, she shared information about protests in support of the opposition party Vente Venezuela. People began to send her videos of police violence and accounts of threats they’d received, and she would repost them.
Castañeda’s posts made her mother, Luisa, nervous, but Castañeda was convinced that Vente Venezuela would take power. Instead, last July, Maduro declared victory in an election that is widely understood to be corrupt. Protesters thronged the streets, banging pots and pans. Maduro, accusing them of participating in a coup, began a brutal crackdown, which has included the torture, secret detention, and killing of protesters, opposition-party members, and their relatives, according to Human Rights Watch.
Last fall, government officials showed up at Castañeda’s door with a search warrant. Castañeda wasn’t home, but her mother was. The officials shoved Luisa, who fell and fractured her hip. They searched Castañeda’s room and seized papers, a thumb drive, and a laptop. Later, Castañeda would learn that there was a warrant for her arrest, accusing her of treason. Castañeda, terrified, began selling her clothes to fund an escape. In mid-December, she and her mother fled Venezuela, intending to claim political asylum in the United States. But, midway through their journey north, President Donald Trump, in one of his first acts, effectively suspended political asylum at the border.
The asylum system in the United States dates back to the years after the Second World War, when the international community put protections in place for people who had been displaced or were fleeing persecution. It has become a focal point of the immigration debate in recent years as the majority of migrants crossing the southwest border have sought asylum. According to U.S. law, people who demonstrate “credible fear” of political persecution in their home country have the right to have their case heard by an immigration judge, even if they crossed the border illegally. But the system is so backlogged—there are nearly two million pending cases—that it can take years before that happens. “The wait became its own draw,” Adam Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America, said. Donald Trump, in his first term, imposed strict (and controversial) limits on asylum; Joe Biden partly lifted these, at first, but ultimately instituted others. In his second term, Trump seems bent on going further.
“Rather than fixing the wait by hiring more judges and asylum officers at a fraction of the cost of what they’re proposing to spend on border security”—in the Republican tax bill—“they’re just trying to stop the system entirely,” Isacson said. “We seem to be headed back to how things were before 1945, and it’s happening at a time when the number of people fleeing insecurity and other threats is pretty much the highest it’s been in about fifty years.”
Castañeda and her mother travelled through Central America as the United States barrelled toward Inauguration Day. Castañeda wasn’t seriously concerned about the new Administration. At the end of Trump’s first term, he had extended protections to Venezuelans, shielding them from deportation; in an official memo, Trump cited the Maduro administration’s responsibility for “the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere in recent memory.” As she understood it, Trump wanted to get criminals out of the country, and she wasn’t a criminal.
In Panama, the two women met a gentle young father named Anthony Cordova-Velez, who was travelling with his mother, wife, and young daughter. Cordova-Velez’s family had fled Ecuador after a cartel attempted to extort him and, when he refused to pay, left death threats on his mother’s door. They, too, were hoping to claim asylum. The group travelled together when they could, although sometimes Castañeda and her mother lagged behind, owing to Luisa’s poor health.
When Castañeda and Luisa finally arrived in Mexico, in early January, they created accounts on the CBP One app, which, in 2023, became the main conduit by which migrants could seek asylum in the U.S. (The app could only be accessed in Mexico.) The women settled in to wait for the app to inform them when to present themselves at a U.S. port of entry in order to make their asylum claims—a process that could take months. But on January 20th, the day that Trump took the oath of office, the CBP One app suddenly stopped working. In an executive order, Trump claimed that there was an “invasion” at the southern border, and that migrants are “restricted from invoking” asylum until the Administration declares otherwise. (The order is being challenged in court by the A.C.L.U. and a coalition of immigrants’-rights groups.)
Castañeda and her mother were unsure what to do. The influx of migrants had spurred a shadow economy of extortion and exploitation in Mexico, and it was difficult to know whom to trust. Landlords quoted jacked-up prices when they learned the women were from Venezuela; they ended up sharing a room with more than a half-dozen other people. Castañeda applied for a job as a receptionist in a hospital, but when the man who interviewed her told her she was pretty she realized that something else was going on. He tried to enlist her in a scheme to marry an elderly U.S. citizen. After she declined, the man harassed her—over the phone and in person—for weeks.
Last month, Castañeda and Luisa, along with Cordova-Velez and his mother, Esneida, decided that their safest choice was to head north to claim asylum. (Cordova-Velez’s wife opted to return to Ecuador with their daughter after the family escaped a kidnapping attempt in Mexico.) They travelled to Chihuahua City and tried to take a rideshare car to the closest official border crossing, in Ojinaga. But the rideshare economy in the region was controlled by the cartels. (Last year, five drivers were shot in the back of the head, reportedly for agreeing to transport migrants from Chihuahua City to Ojinaga without cartel permission.) The driver took them several hours in the wrong direction, to a small border town called Manuel Benavides that had an unsettling atmosphere: prominent security cameras surveilled the empty streets. The driver dropped them off at a hotel, where a woman told the group that someone would come to take them across the border the next day. As Castañeda understood it, the town was controlled by a cartel, and to cross they’d have to pay money they didn’t have. She tried to play it off, telling the woman that she was a content creator in town to make videos about tourism.
That night, the foursome snuck out of town, too afraid to turn on their flashlights. It took hours to reach the Rio Grande. When they crossed the river, near the Lajitas Golf Resort, they were spotted by a soldier on lookout duty, one of the thousands of U.S. troops newly stationed at the border. By the time a Border Patrol agent found the group, not far from the riverbank, Castañeda had her Venezuelan arrest warrant in her hand. “I’m being politically persecuted!” she told the agent. Castañeda, Luisa, Cordova-Velez, and Esneida were arrested and charged with illegal entry into the United States.
In the past, after a migrant’s criminal case for illegal entry unfolded, they would be taken into ICE custody, where they could attempt to plead for asylum. “The real battle is in immigration court,” one attorney told me. But when Castañeda spoke with Chris Carlin, who runs a federal public defender’s office in the Western District of Texas, he was concerned that, owing to Trump’s executive order, she might not be permitted to make an asylum claim at all. Instead, he warned her that she could be swiftly deported, potentially back to Venezuela. About two thousand people, including at least ninety-four women and two children, have been deported from the United States to Venezuela so far this year. “We’ve never shut down access to the asylum process to this extent,” Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, told me. She described the case of a married couple, both Christians, who came to the U.S. fleeing religious persecution in Iran. The husband has been deported to Costa Rica, while the wife has been detained and fears being sent to a third country. “We are undermining all the principles that this country stands for, and people’s lives are hanging in the balance,” Crow said.
