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Raul Pinto, a senior staff attorney at the American Immigration Council, noted that “the rapid development of the app makes you wonder whether the app was actually ready to take on this very important role.”
Last night, the pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42 expired. With that policy in the rearview mirror, the White House and immigration officials are reverting to the pre-pandemic Title 8—which actually heightens penalties for illegal entries into the United States, resulting in a five-year re-entry ban. Despite those steep penalties, Title 8 also allows migrants to apply for asylum at a port of entry.
Even as the asylum application process reverts to Title 8, the method for applying for asylum is undergoing a digital leap. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is streamlining the legal immigration process into a mobile application known as “CBP One.”
The CBP One app, first created in 2018, was not originally intended to be the digital underpinning of the U.S. asylum system, public records obtained by the American Immigration Council show. Raul Pinto, a senior staff attorney at the American Immigration Council, told the Prospect that the public records painted a picture of an app originally designed for cargo inspection but then transformed into “the main tool to access the asylum process.”
The public records described CBP One’s core team as composed of three “product owners.” But those identities were redacted. When I asked a federal contracting expert, Scott Amey from the Project On Government Oversight, he said that based upon the codes used for redaction, it appeared that it was likely concealing the identities of law enforcement officials and agencies, not an outside contractor. At time of writing, CBP had not responded to the Prospect’s question about whether CBP One’s “product owners” included federal contractors.
That shift came fast. Pinto noted that “the rapid development of the app makes you wonder whether the app was actually ready to take on this very important role.” Before Title 42’s expiration, migrant rights advocates raised concerns about the app’s reliability, software issues, and compatibility with unsophisticated smartphones; plus privacy concerns regarding biometric, geolocation, and facial recognition data harvesting.
Now, with the end of Title 42, advocates are concerned about whether the app can remedy previous software issues while adjusting to the latest shifts in U.S. immigration policy. To be fair, there’s potential for CBP One to streamline a notoriously convoluted process by centralizing and streamlining services. But at the same time, restrictions dictated by U.S. policy, combined with the app’s documented history of software glitches, could exacerbate those problems, if not create new ones. Avoiding that possibility is paramount as CBP One increasingly becomes the first touch point for migrants seeking asylum.
During the Title 42 era, migrants using the CBP One app would apply at a designated time each day, predictably causing it to crash—akin to how Ticketmaster goes down every time a new Taylor Swift concert is announced. Maureen Meyer, from the Washington Office on Latin America, said some of the early issues included confusion over whether a single application could be used for a whole family, or whether each person needed to file for separate appointments. That desperate race for an appointment often meant that potential surveillance concerns were overlooked as migrants attempted to schedule asylum hearings.
Despite DHS expanding the number of appointments available per day, it still falls short of the number of people waiting along the southern U.S. border.
Meyer described additional software issues with the facial recognition technology. For example, photos of migrants from Africa and Haiti were not accepted by CBP One’s facial recognition system, because the app couldn’t recognize their dark skin. They couldn’t even begin the asylum process for reasons completely beyond their control or related to the merits of their case.
Ahead of Title 42’s expiration, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be revamping the app’s appointment scheduling system. Those changes included offering more time to request an appointment, and then DHS following up to offer an appointment. According to the Department of Homeland Security, applicants waiting the longest would be prioritized. In addition, DHS would expand the number of appointments available each day to 1,000.
Meanwhile, Meyer estimated that around 700 to 800 appointments were being offered per day during Title 42. Katherine Hawkins from the Project On Government Oversight told the Prospect that despite DHS expanding the number of appointments available per day, it still falls short of the number of people waiting along the southern U.S. border. Hawkins described participating in a DHS press call where additional restrictions were announced, such as that if a migrant arrives at a port of entry without a CBP One appointment, that could constitute “circumvent[ing] lawful pathways,” thereby subjecting them to penalties under Title 8.
At time of writing, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had not responded to the Prospect’s questions about how many appointments were being offered daily prior to Title 42’s expiration. Additionally, CBP did not respond to questions asking if additional criteria such as country of origin were being considered in deciding which migrants receive the chance to book an appointment.
