Hundreds of migrants try to force their way into US at Mexico border

- U.S. officials stopped hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants entering the country from Mexico yesterday after a large group broke through Mexican lines to demand asylum in the U.S., only to be thwarted by barbed wire, barriers and shields. Frustrated

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, (Reuters) other side.

Many migrants have become fed up with the asylum process since the Biden administration made an app called CBP One available to them that was meant to streamline applications.

They say the app is beset by persistent glitches and high demand, leaving them in limbo in perilous border regions. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said recent app updates will simplify and speed up the process.

Describing her situation as "horrible, horrible," Paz said she had been trying to cross the border for a month, watching her money disappear and getting no nearer to claiming asylum.

"We want answers please," she said, "the (CBP One) application has done absolutely nothing for us."

VATICAN CITY, (Reuters) - Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has ordered the closure of the Vatican Embassy in Managua and that of the Nicaraguan Embassy to the Vatican in Rome, a senior Vatican source said yesterday.

Nicaragua signalled that the move, which came a few days after Pope Francis compared the Nicaraguan government to a dictatorship, was "a suspension" of diplomatic relations.

The Vatican source said that while the closures do not automatically mean a total break of relations between Managua and the Holy See, they are serious steps towards that possibility.

Ortega's administration has been increasingly isolated internationally since he began cracking down heavily on dissent following street protests that erupted in 2018. Ortega called the protests an attempted coup against his government.

Bishop Rolando Alvarez, a vocal critic of Ortega, was sentenced to more than 26 years in prison in Nicaragua last month on charges that included treason, undermining national integrity and spreading false news.

Alvazez was convicted after he refused to leave the country along with 200 political prisoners released by Ortega's government and sent to the United States. Alvarez refused to board the plane and was stripped of his citizenship.

In an interview published last week with Latin American online news outlet Infobae ahead of Monday's 10th anniversary of his pontificate, the pope pointed to Alvarez's imprisonment and likened what was happening in Nicaragua to the "1917 Communist dictatorship or that of Hitler in 1935".

Staff in both embassies had been down to barebones for years with only a chargé d'affaires for the Vatican in Managua and almost no one for Nicaragua in Rome.