An Abusive App, Daily Brief May 6, 2024

The US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) created a mobile application, called “CBP One.” It’s supposed to be, “a single portal to a variety of CBP services.”

One of these “services” is to arrange appointments for those seeking asylum in the US. And it’s doing a terrible job of it.

Let’s remember the basics. Everyone has the right to seek asylum in another country. This does not mean – as the shouty hate-mongers on US TV news channels would have you believe – that anyone can just live wherever they want. No. It means you have the right to ask for asylum, and the authorities should look at your individual case and treat you humanely in the meantime.

US law guarantees this right, and it’s also affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

However, for decades, successive US administrations – both Republicans and Democrats – have narrowed access to asylum. In a sense, the CBP One app, launched under Trump and expanded under Biden, seems no more than a high-tech continuation of a long-standing bipartisan effort.

Using CBP One is pretty much mandatory for people seeking asylum in the US. But it’s clunky to use, and obviously, you need a mobile phone in the first place. This is not something every would-be asylum seeker possesses, either having lost everything in fleeing whatever danger they’re running from – or seeing it stolen by criminals or Mexican officials along the way.

Most importantly, the CBP system does not supply enough appointments through the app to meet demand. A new report goes into extensive detail, and user reviews of the app on hosting sites Google and Apple are an endless list of frustrations with functionality and desperation over delays. Asylum seekers give the app one star out of five, only because zero stars is not an option.

What’s happening here is what’s called “metering,” that is strictly limiting the number of people allowed to seek asylum each day. In a way, again, this is nothing new: the US started doing metering by other means under Obama, and the practice was formalized under Trump. Since 2017, there have been legal challenges to metering as a violation of US and international law.

The problem created by metering – now “digital metering” with the CBP One app – is that tens of thousands of people seeking asylum in the US have been forced to wait in Mexico. Often, they are there for several months, exposed to serious dangers, like rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.

If I had to review the CBP One app, I’d say: terrible app, zero stars.