At the beginning of this year, the Biden Administration’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection rolled out CBP One, a phone app that asylum-seekers are required to use in order to schedule a border entry appointment. Plagued by technical glitches and discrimination against Black users, the app’s rollout has been a disaster. Appointments for asylum-seekers are absurdly difficult to obtain, creating weeks- or months-long wait times by the border.
CBP One’s launch comes as the Biden Administration is preparing for the termination of Title 42, a controversial policy that put a freeze on America’s asylum process in response to COVID-19. With the end of Title 42, CBP One will take its place as a means of keeping migrants stuck at the border—a high-tech, savvier version of “metering,” an illegal practice that limits the number of people allowed to seek asylum at the border per day.
On January 25, 2023, Jairon Abraham Cruz, a seventeen-year-old asylum-seeker, was shot and killed in a hotel room while waiting for an appointment through CBP One. On March 29, amid a build up in asylum seekers near the U.S. border awaiting appointments on CBP One, a deadly fire broke out at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juarez, killing thirty-eight men, most of whom were Central American asylum-seekers.
As Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told The Texas Monthly, there is an inevitable human cost to policies that force asylum-seekers to wait for weeks and months for an elusive immigration process: “They are not safe in northern Mexico—people are going to die.”
CBP One is not the first border policy to weaponize the dangers of migrating. This strategy was key to the Clinton administration’s 1994 “Prevention Through Deterrence” plan, which beefed up border security and drove migration flows to the Sonoran Desert in order to decrease attempted border crossings by making entry into the United States an increasingly deadly feat.
Despite its inconceivable human costs—an estimated 10,000 people have died crossing the Sonoran Desert since the plan’s implementation—the strategy endured. From Bush to Obama, the idea of making the border-crossing process more dangerous became an acceptable bipartisan approach.
In 2019, the Trump administration took this strategy a step further with its “Remain in Mexico” program, which forced asylum-seekers to wait for months and years in northern Mexico while adjudicating their cases in hastily erected border courts. By pooling tens of thousands in volatile border regions without state protection, Trump’s policy created an ideal marketplace for organized crime. Doctors Without Borders reported that 80% of migrants in the program had faced at least one incident of violence while waiting for their asylum hearing.
Of the 70,000 program “participants,” just over 500 were granted legal relief in immigration court. Many asylum-seekers did exactly what the U.S. government hoped they would: abandoned their asylum cases.
Like “Remain in Mexico,” CBP One forces asylum-seekers to become sitting ducks for what the FBI has described as a “multi-billion dollar industry” of extortion, trafficking, and official corruption. CBP One’s outcomes—an empowered cartel system at the border, rampant violence and preventable deaths—are likely to be the same as well.
The Biden Administration is making the same cruel bet as their predecessors: that asylum-seekers will hear about deaths and violence at the border and decide to stay in a country where they’ll face persecution because of who they are, what they do, or who they love—rather than face down the horrors of the U.S. immigration system.
This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.