Fleeing for Your Life? There’s An App for That.
The Biden administration has replaced key elements of our 50-year-old
asylum system with “CBP One,” a smartphone application. It looks like
the future—but potentially a dystopian one.
When Jairon Abraham Cruz left Cuba in early January, he had already
spent years looking north toward the United States, telling his mother
about his dreams of living in Florida, where his grandmother already
resided. In October, the seventeen-year-old had posted a photo of
himself on Facebook dancing with an American flag, the Havana skyline
silhouetted in the sunset behind him. He hoped to become a dance
influencer on YouTube and TikTok in the states. Then, around New Year’s
Day, as Cuba had slipped into a historic economic crisis and the
government cracked down on protesters, Cruz’s mother and her husband
decided it was finally time for them, Cruz, and their daughter to leave.
When the family’s journey to the U.S. began, it felt to Cruz like the
start of a new life. In reality, the teenager was living out his final
days.
For generations, Cubans have fled the country, pushing off from the island in inner tubes, on Styrofoam boats, and even in old trucks outfitted with propellers.
Rather than make the traditional voyage across the Atlantic to the
U.S., however, Cruz and his family left in a way that’s become more
common in recent years, as the U.S. Coast Guard has increased
enforcement and repatriation of Cubans intercepted at sea. They traveled
first to Monterrey, nestled in the steep peaks of the Sierra Madre
range in northeastern Mexico, with the intention of traveling nearly 150
miles north upon arrival and requesting asylum in the U.S. at the
official port of entry in Laredo.
The family planned to travel
quickly and avoid spending time in the notoriously dangerous Mexican
border city of Nuevo Laredo, but in Monterrey, they learned about a new
requirement for asylum seekers arriving on the U.S. border. Talking with
their relatives already living in the U.S. with citizenship, the family
learned that, if they simply arrived in Texas and attempted to request
asylum, agents with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would
immediately deport them, no matter what. “My family and I were on our
way to the border when the new law came up,” Cruz’s mother, Yamisleidys
González, said over text.
Seeking to crack down on border crossings, both legal and illegal, President Biden announced
on January 5 a new requirement to greatly limit the number of migrants
who can officially request asylum. Today, those fleeing persecution need
to first use an official CBP app, CBP One, to make an appointment at
the border. (CBP One was first rolled out in limited cases in 2021
but was not a broad requirement until January.) Unlike many asylum
seekers, González had a smartphone, and she managed to use the new
system. But, while CBP was releasing dozens of new appointments every
morning, thousands of asylum seekers were waiting to cross and slots
filled up almost instantly, so the earliest that González could schedule
one for her family was weeks away, on February 3.
The family
booked a hotel in Monterrey, a relatively prosperous industrial city
that’s considered one of the safer places in northern Mexico. Their
downtown dwelling, Hotel La Silla, had seen better days. But the
accommodations were far better than those of thousands of asylum seekers
who sleep on the streets in border towns, where their foreign accents
betray their vulnerability to cartels and kidnappers.
Two weeks
later, in the early morning, the family heard shouting in the hotel
hallway—at least two men were screaming something about Colombians.
Someone suddenly began trying to force open their hotel room, and Cruz,
closest to the door, rushed to hold it shut as González picked up her
four-year-old daughter and ran to the bathroom. She heard two gunshots
fired through the door. The men grabbed her husband, Gabriel Fernández,
and pulled him out of the hotel, though he eventually fought them off.
When González came out of the bathroom, she saw Cruz lying on the
ground. He passed away in front of his mother and sister. He was the
first asylum seeker to die while waiting for an appointment on CBP’s
app.
“He loved to dance and make everyone laugh,” González, said. “He was so young.”
News about Cruz’s
death reached Priscilla Orta, an asylum attorney in Brownsville, the
morning after the teenager died. It broke her down. For weeks, Orta and
her nonprofit, Lawyers for Good Government’s ‘Project Corazon’
initiative, which provides aid to immigrants, had worked with asylum
seekers on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande Valley, helping them use
the new app. At first, she’d been optimistic about the technology. CBP
One had the chance to introduce some order to the immigration system and
to finally give asylum seekers the basic information they all craved:
how to do things the right way.
For most of the past
fifty years, U.S. law has guaranteed that any foreigners who present
themselves to authorities on U.S. soil have a right to seek asylum; our
country will let them in as long as they can prove they were fleeing
persecution or danger. For decades, CBP agents would interview newly
arrived asylum seekers on the border and, if their claims were deemed
credible, allow them to stay in the U.S. until their court hearings to
prove their cases. But in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first
forced shutdowns in the U.S., the Trump administration began summarily
expelling almost every asylum seeker who arrived on the border, invoking
Title 42, a once-obscure federal statute that allows the president to
halt immigration during public health emergencies.
The policy
continued under the Biden administration, which has expelled more than
2.4 million would-be asylum seekers. The administration tried to end the policy
in May 2022, but it remains in effect as it winds through the courts.
But the administration has allowed more than 2.5 million migrants into
the country, at least temporarily, under normal immigration procedures.
Many of these were asylum seekers whom agents deemed “particularly
vulnerable,” and who were granted Title 42 exemptions, and have been
permitted to cross into the country to pursue their claims in court.
CBP
One has massively narrowed the pool of asylum seekers allowed to seek
these Title 42 exemptions. Orta got a vivid window into how the new
policy works in Reynosa, one of the most notoriously dangerous cities in
Mexico, across the river from McAllen. Since the new regulations went
into place, Orta and her team have seen multiple torture victims—some
with clear evidence of physical injuries—turned away at the port.
CBP officials told them they’d have to use app. “I do not think this
happened because our local officers are heartless,” Orta said. “I do
not—I think this is a conscious decision by the administration.”
The
process of using the app is theoretically straightforward. On CBP One,
asylum seekers first certify they meet certain “vulnerability criteria.”
Then, they enter biographical information and take a facial photo,
using the selfie camera in video mode (a CBP spokesperson said this
video-selfie feature is to ensure “liveness”—in other words, that a real
person is taking the photo). Finally, they book official appointments
to meet with CBP agents to review their cases at one of eight ports
along the border. (Five of these ports are in Texas: from the
easternmost entry point in Brownsville, upriver to Hidalgo, Laredo,
Eagle Pass, and El Paso.) If all goes well at these appointments, asylum
seekers are released on official parole, with a date to appear in
immigration court to make a formal asylum claim, or otherwise make a
case against their deportation.
In Reynosa and in Matamoros,
across the border from Brownsville, Orta and her team have advised
dozens of asylum seekers on how to get appointments through CBP One.
When the app works, the system is orderly, and CBP agents at the ports
are respectful and efficient. But Orta has found that in many ways CBP
One has functioned more like a deterrence mechanism to reject travelers
than like a mode of entry. It’s closer to razor wire than to an open
gate. Where once the basic requirement for seeking asylum was “fleeing
persecution,” now there’s a whole host of additional requirements, among
them: having a working smartphone; internet connection to use the app;
and the ability to read and write in English, Spanish, or, only
recently, Haitian Creole, the only languages the app offers. Many of the
most vulnerable do not meet these criteria.
When asylum seekers
began using CBP One in January, they also discovered a finicky app
plagued with bugs that would often crash. It felt like the digital
equivalent of visiting the DMV. Aid workers also quickly noticed a
troubling pattern. The photo scan feature struggled to take photos of
most users (when I used it at home in Austin, it crashed multiple times,
and didn’t recognize my face at first). For users who were Black,
especially, it repeatedly failed to work, unable to recognize
differences in contrast on dark skin. Speaking on background, a CBP
spokesperson acknowledged the bugs, but denied that the photo scan is
not working for those with dark skin.
CBP One also has muddled
the asylum process. At no point does the app ask users “Are you seeking
asylum?” Those arriving for the CBP One appointments are given no
interviews and asked no questions about vulnerabilities they listed in
the app or about why they’re seeking asylum in the U.S.—they’re simply
released into the country on official parole. Their court dates, in
immigration court, aren’t even necessarily asylum trials: they’re often
deportation hearings, where defendants can make arguments for remaining
in the country, including through our asylum system. “That’s the crazy
part: nothing in the new [CBP One] parole program requires that you seek
asylum,” Orta said. “Somehow, we’ve decided to punish those who arrive
on the border, without the app, actually seeking asylum, but we’re going
to let in those who may or may not have any particular reason to seek
asylum, [including some] who feel safe in their home country.”
Orta
added, with a laugh, that she sometimes feels more frustrated with
Biden than Trump—under whom policies made more sense: they were all
obviously deterrence measures. “At least under Trump, I knew how to work
the system,” Orta said.
During the Trump administration,
as family separation dominated the headlines, a lesser-known Trump
policy later dubbed “Remain in Mexico” affected thousands of migrant
families, forcing them to wait for asylum hearings for months, sometimes
years, in Mexico, rather than north of the border as was standard
practice for decades. CBP began a “metering” policy: at each port,
agents only accepted a small number of asylum seekers
each day and told the rest to wait. Stuck in cities such as Tijuana with
nowhere to go, asylum seekers coordinated among themselves and created
“La Lista”—an unofficial, but quite formal, list jotted down in
college-ruled notebooks that tracked where each migrant stood in the
line to ask for asylum. Almost every week, asylum seekers waiting for
their turn reported getting raped, robbed, kidnapped, and extorted in northern Mexico.
CBP
One looks like a brave new future, but, in many ways, it’s simply a
digital version of those notebooks. Advocates such as Guerline Jozef,
cofounder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, one of
the main nonprofits guiding asylum seekers through CBP One, worries that
the app is simply an extension of Remain in Mexico, a Kafkaesque
bureaucratic mechanism—like when a pilot says “We’ll be moving in about a
half hour” to keep passengers calm during an indefinite delay. She sees
it as a way to encourage asylum seekers to wait patiently in dangerous
areas for an opportunity that may never come. Jozef has met some
families who have tried for weeks to get appointments, to no avail. “If
people have to wait a week, two weeks, a month, that’s a problem,” Jozef
said. “They are not safe in northern Mexico—people are going to die.”
In
Monterrey, Jairon Abraham Cruz did die. In desperation, his
grandmother, a U.S. citizen in Miami, reached out to a local immigration
lawyer, Wilfredo Allen, for help. As they grieved the death of Cruz and
worked to get his body repatriated to Cuba, the family struggled
mightily to get the app to work for them. “We got them a new phone; we
tried re-downloading the app; nothing worked,” Allen told me, adding
that the experience of struggling with the app taught him something. “If
you’re in northern Mexico, [the app] will give you a lot of hope. But
it’s going to be a difficult road.”
Eventually, Allen contacted
CBP, and agents guided him through how to make the app work; the
solution involved completely deleting the family’s existing profile and
starting again from scratch. In late February, Cruz’s mother and young
sister finally made it into the U.S. through a new parole program for
Cuban asylum seekers, which Biden had announced at the same time as CBP
One in early January.
González’s husband did not cross with his
wife and daughter. Two months after fleeing for a better life, he
returned to Cuba, to await the return of Cruz’s body.
Correction 3/4/2023: A previous version of this article conflated the experiences of multiple asylum seekers in a paragraph about a Haitian migrant who was turned back at the border. This
article has been updated to note that Priscilla Orta and her team
members encountered multiple torture victims in Reynosa, who were then
each turned away at the port.