Immigrant rights advocates and asylum seekers filed a lawsuit against Customs and Border Protection last week, claiming federal officials have created a new, unlawful hurdle for people seeking asylum in the United States.
Migrants fleeing violence in their home countries are now required to book an appointment with border officials through CBP One, a smartphone app designed by the US government.
“It is unfathomable that a refugee who just traveled across nine different countries with only the clothes on their back would somehow have access to a very expensive smartphone,” said Angelo Guisado, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, part of the legal team behind the lawsuit.
Many asylum seekers cannot schedule appointments on the app because they do not have “up-to-date smartphones, wifi, a cellular data plan, or reliable electricity, all of which are necessary to use CBP One”, according to the new lawsuit.
The lucky few who managed to download CBP One said the app is riddled with technical glitches, indecipherable error messages, and mistranslations of English words.
“People are scraping together whatever money they have to buy smartphones, all for an app that does not work,” Guisado told the Guardian.
Though the app is available to view in Spanish and Haitian Creole, the error messages are often written in English. One migrant showed Guisado an error message that appeared to just be a line of computer code.
“We know the Republicans intend on making life harder for every single poor, Black, or brown person who wants to immigrate here, but Democrats are doing the same exact thing while putting forth these statements that adhere to higher ideals,” Guisado said.
The Biden administration first announced the CBP One requirement for asylum seekers in May, when the US prepared to lift a pandemic-era restriction on immigration called Title 42. As the government braced for a sudden uptick in migrants along the US-Mexico border, the app was billed as a tool to more quickly process asylum requests.
Despite widespread warnings, the so-called “migrant surge” never materialized. In May, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN that border agents saw a “50% drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week before Title 42 ended”.
Still, the Biden administration continued to use CBP One to process people seeking asylum. Even after officials touted record-low border crossings, the app remains a primary arbiter of who gets to be considered for asylum.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection told the Guardian that, thanks to the app’s new usage, the agency “is processing on average 4-5 times as many migrants per day at south-west border ports of entry than it did a decade ago, significantly expanding access to our ports of entry.”
The agency spokesperson also said “CBP continues to process individuals who walk up to a port of entry without an appointment”.
Under the Department of Homeland Security’s own guidelines, migrants who face exceptional danger, like threats of murder or kidnapping, are eligible for asylum without a pre-scheduled appointment.
But when a Nicaraguan woman – identified in the lawsuit as Michelle Doe – approached the border with her newborn baby, officers turned her away. She explained that her abusive ex-partner, a member of the Mexican cartel, had broken her phone before he threatened to kill her.
The border officers told Michelle that she still needed to book an appointment through CBP One.
Many of the would-be asylees in the lawsuit are single mothers who fled their homes after experiencing domestic abuse, threats of gang violence, or in Michelle’s case – both.
“After getting turned away by CBP, they come to us to hide them,” said Nicole Ramos, director of the border rights project at Al Otro Lado, a legal nonprofit and a plaintiff in the new lawsuit.
Since May, Ramos and her team have scrambled to find safe shelter and medical care for asylum seekers who were turned away because of the new app policy.
It’s dangerous work that requires extreme discretion – Ramos is in constant fear that migrants like Melissa will be discovered by cartel members while waiting to land an appointment with US border officials.
“While they’re waiting to get this app to work, these people are being hunted,” Ramos said. “The only time it seems possible for us to get around this app, to get an exception, is when people have very, very grave and urgent medical conditions.”
Even then, Ramos said she and her colleagues need to show Customs and Border Protection “extensive medical documentation” to prove that a migrant qualifies for an exception. Because the process of getting an exception is so cumbersome, Ramos said she has been forced to triage asylum cases, prioritizing the migrants who cannot receive medical care in Mexico.
“The whole process requires us as advocates to participate in vulnerability Olympics, we have to decide who is most likely to die sooner, so we push to prioritize their cases,” she said.
