This story was originally published at Prism.

On a recent morning, Maria Del Carmen Cortes, 42, roamed through a concrete path near a bus station in northern Mexico City lined with makeshift homes made of wood and plastic tarps. She stopped in front of an improvised food stall where Mari Ruiz, 42, was firing up a pan of Venezuelan arepas, a thick flatbread made of cornmeal dough.

“You see a lot of things along the way,” Cortes said, leaning against a wooden post waiting for her breakfast. Her curls were fastened into a bun, and a butterfly necklace sat above her collarbone. It had been a year since Cortes and her husband left their seven children in Colombia in search of a better life. Like thousands of other migrants, they traversed the perilous Darien Gap, that connects North and South America and were now trying to make ends meet selling candy at traffic lights. “Yesterday, I felt depressed,” Cortes said.

Until January, would-be immigrants like Ruiz and Cortes waited in this migrant camp for an appointment with officials through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection app, CBP One. The appointments offered a chance to request asylum in the U.S. For many would-be migrants, the opportunity to legally enter the country led them to wait weeks or even months to secure an appointment. However, the day he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump shut down the app, halting the sole pathway to seek asylum. Trump’s crackdown has caused distress and anguish for many migrants, compounding their already precarious mental health.

According to Franking Frías, executive director of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Mexico and Central America, the humanitarian organization has been treating between 40 to 50 migrants a week in Mexico........

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