Back in January 2023, Customs and Border Protection rolled out the CBP One™ mobile application to facilitate legal migration for asylum seekers. We’re now learning that the mobile app, to the shock of not one GOP member of Congress, is having the opposite effect.
The CPB says on its website that “As part of CBP’s comprehensive effort to improve the security of our nation’s borders while enhancing legitimate travel and trade, CBP One provides increased accessibility and transparency to some of CBP’s most utilized services.”
And smugglers love it.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, says “This administration has taken [CBP One™] and turned it into a way of facilitating illegal immigration because if somebody makes an appointment on the CBP One app and they show up at a port of entry and they are let in or let go, they’re still illegal aliens,” adding that “The administration has no legal authority to let those people go and they’re doing it anyway.”
“A lot of people, smugglers and regular illegals, you know, potentially illegal, said, ‘Okay, well, let’s wait and see. Let’s see how it’s going there. We’re holding back.’ That’s what happens anytime we change policy,” Krikorian said, referencing the initial implementation of the CBP One app for migrant appointments. “There was a brief pause in June in border patrol numbers, some of which was made up for by people being illegally let into the country with CBP One but even that brief reduction looks like it has been eliminated.”
The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) is estimating August’s border encounters will be more than July’s encounters.
“So the administration prematurely declared victory and their attempts at half measures, at trying to plead with potential illegals, ‘please don’t come, it makes us look bad in the newspapers,’ are not being heeded,” Krikorian said.
By using CBP One, migrants are “not jumping the border, which is a federal crime as well as a civil offense, but they’re showing up at a port of entry” instead, Kirkorian continues.
“The administration is the one breaking the law by releasing them into the United States but the point is they’re still illegal aliens. It’s still illegal immigration,” he added.
“They still have to pay smugglers to get here and the whole thing is a boon for alien smugglers,” he said. “It’s supposed to only be for people who have made it to Mexico already and even that’s bad enough, because you have to pay a smuggler to get there but the smugglers have figured it out. They’re actually using it.”
