With demand far outstripping available slots, a new U.S. government mobile phone app has been an exercise in frustration for many asylum hopefuls
Pandemic-era limits on asylum known as Title 42 have been rarely discussed among many of tens of thousands of migrants massed on Mexico’s border with the United States.
Their eyes were — and are — fixed instead on a new U.S. government mobile app that grants 1,000 people daily an appointment to cross the border and seek asylum while living in the U.S. With demand far outstripping available slots, the app has been an exercise in frustration for many — and a test of the Biden administration’s strategy of coupling new legal paths to entry with severe consequences for those who don’t.
“You start to give up hope but it’s the only way,” Teresa Muñoz, 48, who abandoned her home in the Mexican state of Michoacan after a gang killed her husband and beat her. She has been trying for a month to gain entry through the app, called CBPOne, while staying in a Tijuana shelter with her two children and 2-year-old grandson.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Border Patrol made 6,300 arrests on Friday — the first day after Title 42 expired — and 4,200 Saturday. That’s sharply below the 10,000-plus on three days last week as migrants rushed to get in before new policies to restrict asylum took effect.
“It is still early,» Mayorkas said Sunday on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’ “We are in day three, but we have been planning for this transition for months and months. And we have been executing on our plan. And we will continue to do so.”
Despite the drop in recent days, authorities predict arrests will spike to between 12,000 and 14,000 a day, Matthew Hudak, deputy Border Patrol chief, said in a court filing Friday. And authorities cannot confidently estimate how many will cross, Hudak said, noting intelligence reports failed to quickly flag a “singular surge” of 18,000 predominantly Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021.
