The Biden administration allowed 900,000 people to use an app to schedule appointments to cross the border. Emails over the last few days told them to leave or face deportation.
Tens of thousands of immigrants who had been allowed to temporarily live and work in the United States under the Biden administration have received a seemingly unequivocal message in recent days from the Department of Homeland Security.
Leave “immediately.”
The termination notices, which started being delivered electronically last week, were more indication that migrants who followed the rules set by the last administration may be among the most vulnerable now as President Trump seeks to make good on his campaign promise of mass deportations.
Many migrants who entered the country using the CBP One app — introduced in 2023 to bring order to the chaotic influx at the southwestern border — have been told their legal status would end seven days after the date on their notice. If they failed to depart voluntarily, they would be targeted for enforcement and deported, the notices said.
“They believed they were following the right path by using the government-provided app,” said Joy Tucker, board chairwoman of Kaleidoscope Humanitarian Aid, a nonprofit organization in Tucson, Ariz.
In a twist, at least 10 immigration lawyers, most of whom are U.S. citizens, said that they, too, had received the notices urging them to depart the country, possibly because of a glitch linking their email addresses to the immigration documents of their clients.
Despite a few high-profile roundups of undocumented immigrants by federal law enforcement, the new wave of notices indicates that the bulk of “removals” by the administration is likely to come from the revocation of immigrants’ legal status, not, as Mr. Trump promised, the large-scale deportation of criminal migrants. On Monday, ahead of Mr. Trump’s meeting with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the White House singled out about two dozen deportees by name that officials said were criminal gang members.
