The dangers of CBP One, the app to request asylum at the US-Mexico border: Extortion, kidnappings and months-long waits

Members of the group of migrants kept looking at their cell phones. There were 18 of them, including 11 minors, comprised of two families from Mexico and one from Guatemala, who have been living in a Tijuana shelter. But the weeks had gone by, and confirmation of the appointments that would allow them to request asylum in the United States had still not shown up on their devices. The three families’ wait, which lasted for over a year, is familiar to many of those who are trying to migrate to the United States via its southern border. They were chained to their phones.

That’s because a cell phone app, CBP One, has been charged with announcing when they will be allowed to step foot on U.S. territory, when, at long last, their wait in the oftentimes dangerous border towns of northern Mexico will come to an end. In 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration designated the CBP One app as the only avenue — save for a few exceptions — to requesting asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border. To use it, the app must confirm that the applicant is currently in northern or central Mexico.

Out of desperation, on November 29, 2023, this 18-member group of migrants who could not stop looking at their phones, decided to get a flight to Reynosa, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which is also on the U.S.-Mexico border. “There’s a better chance of getting an appointment at that border crossing because it’s more dangerous,” pastor Albert Rivera, the owner of the Ágape shelter where the migrants stayed during their time in Tijuana, tells EL PAÍS by phone. This turned out to be a bad decision. Upon arriving in Reynosa, the group was assaulted and kidnapped.

According to Rivera, their captors told one of the women to pay their ransom quickly so she wouldn’t lose her CBP One appointment. On December 4, 2023, after the families were able to collect the $41,500 that had been demanded of them, they were set free. Pastor Rivera, who traveled from Tijuana to Reynosa, was charged with bringing them back. He says that every individual from the group that was kidnapped lost their CBP One appointment and had to start the process over again. He also recalls how one family member said that, during the kidnapping, they were forced to witness other people who had been captured being murdered and dismembered.

A May report issued by the international organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) collects similar experiences in other parts of Tamaulipas, concluding that cartels “extort asylum seekers who have CBP One appointments, threatening to prevent them from getting to their appointments if they don’t pay.” The CBP One application system “exposes migrants to harm,” says the non-profit. According to its analysis, migrants forced to wait in Mexico “also face forced relocation to southern Mexico by Mexican officials; a lack of access to basic services like health care, potable water, and shelter; violence at the hands of criminal groups as well as Mexican immigration authorities, National Guard soldiers, and police; and the possibility of summary deportation.”

Few appointments, high demand

Around 6,000 people irregularly cross the southern border of the United States every day, according to statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). But only 1,450 CBP One appointments are issued each day, hardly enough to address this demand. Most of them are assigned “randomly,” according to CBP, which clarifies that an update to the application now allows for a certain quota to be assigned to “people who have been waiting the longest.”

According to official data, between January and June 2023, more than 170,000 people obtained an appointment through the application, mostly Haitians, Mexicans and Venezuelans. That’s not Alejandra Centeno’s impression. “Everyone in the shelters leave and only us Mexicans remain. We have to wait longer to get an appointment, like eight to nine months,” she complains in front of the doors of the Juventud 2000 shelter in Tijuana, which is located a few hundred feet from the wall that separates Mexico from the United States.

Centeno is traveling with her family, 19 people in total, all from the Mexican state of Michoacán. They have been waiting for their appointment confirmation through the CBP One for nine months. One of her three children has asthma and has to sleep on the floor of tents inside the shelter: “He has been hospitalized three times because of the cold,” she says.

“People who have been here tell me that it takes up to nine or 10 months to get the appointment,” says another woman in Tijuana, who prefers to remain anonymous for security reasons. She has been waiting for her CBP One appointment for three months with her four children, who are 16, 11, nine and six years old. “It’s very frustrating because I had the oldest girl in high school, and she was doing really well at school, but we can’t put her in classes here because the high schools are so far, an hour away.” If she doesn’t get her appointment soon, her daughter “will miss a year” of school, her mother says.

“The CBP One application turns the legal right to asylum into a lottery system based on chance,” Amnesty International said in a May 2024 press statement, which advocated for allowing people to present themselves at U.S. border crossings to request asylum, as required by international law, free of technological barriers. HRW adds that the daily limit on appointments is a “de facto digital metering system” designed to limit the number of asylum seekers that can be processed at the border every day, and results in others being sent back to Mexico.

In July 2023, several humanitarian organizations and people who have suffered the consequences of using CBP One filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government for rejecting asylum seekers without the appointment app at the southern border, arguing that the application erects unjust barriers and puts the lives of asylum seekers in danger. One of the organizations that participated in the lawsuit, which is still pending, is Al Otro Lado. Its executive director Erika Pinheiro says that the group has been litigating to, “challenge policies that block access to asylum” since 2017. “CBP One is just the latest in a series of policies that we have been facing,” she says.

Technological obstacles

The class action lawsuit also argues that “restricting asylum access to only individuals who can use a smartphone app imposes unfair and at times, insurmountable, barriers” and “creates language, literacy, and disability access issues.” The application is only available in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. That’s a problem because migrants from Asian countries, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Indigenous communities are also arriving at the southern border. What’s more, many asylum seekers do not have a smartphone, either because they did not bring one or they were robbed along the way. Free internet access is not always easy to obtain, and many cannot afford to pay for the service.

Amnesty International has also questioned why the CBP One app requires a photograph to begin the process of requesting an appointment. “The application’s use of facial recognition, GPS tracking and cloud storage to collect data on asylum seekers prior to their entry into the United States raises serious privacy and non-discrimination concerns,” states the organization. It adds: “It is a widely recognized fact that facial recognition systems perform unevenly, depending on key characteristics such as skin color, ethnicity and gender.”

Centeno’s experience validates these fears. “I am very dark. I put in my photo and it said ‘error,’” she says. She was ultimately able to solve the problem by taking her photo in front of a “very white” background. Seated inside her tent as she does one of her daughters’ hair, the woman seems resigned. “Here we are, waiting to see if CBP One takes pity on Mexicans and sends us confirmation of our appointment.”

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