Adam Isacson

We’re getting more and more reports from media and border-area NGOs that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is forcing asylum-seeking families to separate at the borderline when only some family members were able to secure appointments, via the “CBP One” smartphone app, at ports of entry.

Due to a very limited number of exemptions to the Title 42 expulsions policy, these appointments to apply for asylum are scarce, and difficult to obtain for larger groups, such as parents and children all together.

Within the past week or two, CBP officers on the borderline reportedly began more strictly enforcing appointments, refusing entry to family members who had not managed to secure spots with the app, even as they accompanied spouses or parents with appointments.

The Rio Grande Valley, Texas Monitor reported on the scene at the bridge between Reynosa, Tamaulipas and Hidalgo, Texas:

Over on the Hidalgo bridge connecting with Reynosa, Priscilla Orta, an attorney working with Lawyers for Good Government, was in line last Wednesday waiting to cross back into the U.S.

“Next thing I know, there it is, at the bridge, you’re seeing it — people are being forced to make the decisions, families are fighting, there’s crying, they’re screaming,” Orta said.

Families she spoke with also reported feeling jilted by the sudden enforcement that meant they’d have to make a quick decision.

Orta returned to frantic families in Reynosa the next day with questions that CBP is attempting to address.

“I think what’s happening now is that they are trying to correct the issue,” Orta said. “But it’s a pretty big issue, because there are no slots,” she said, referring to the appointment slots available. “They’re gone sometimes by 8:03 a.m. We have sometimes seen that the spots are gone by 8:01 a.m. And everyone knows it.”

On February 24, 2023, the Los Angeles Times cited a Venezuelan migrant who went through this experience in Matamoros, Tamaulipas:

The 25-year-old from Venezuela eventually secured appointments for himself and his wife, but the slots filled up so quickly that he couldn’t get two more for their children. They weren’t worried though — they had heard about families in similar situations being waved through by border officials.

Instead, he said, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent told them last week that because each member of the family did not have an appointment: “You two can enter, but not your children.”

Every morning, a few spots become available on the new “CBP One” app for a few asylum seekers to approach a port of entry (official border crossing) at the U.S.-Mexico border. The spots fill up fast.

Priscilla Orta, an attorney working with Lawyers for Good Government, told reporter Valerie González at the Rio Grande Valley, Texas Monitor, “There are no slots. … They’re gone sometimes by 8:03 a.m. We have sometimes seen that the spots are gone by 8:01 a.m. And everyone knows it.”

It’s easier for a single person to get one of the scarce, coveted spots than it is for an entire family to get a few of them. González spoke to migrant parents who have been able to secure spots for themselves using the app, but not for their spouses or dependent children.

In the weeks after its mid-January rollout of the CBP One app for Title 42 asylum exemptions, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was being lenient about parents wanting to bring family members to their single-person appointments. That leniency has stopped, González reports.

“What happened last week was that they decided to enforce it,” said Felicia Rangel-Samponaro of the Sidewalk School, a service provider that assists migrants across from south Texas.

For some families who witnessed families crossing intact one day and then learning of the new enforcement the next, the change was felt immediately. “So, people had to make decisions on that bridge,” Rangel-Samponaro said.

The way that CBP is enforcing CBP One appointments is causing families to separate. Parents are sending their minor children across the border separately, because the Biden administration isn’t using Title 42 to expel unaccompanied minors. The parents then have to hope somehow to be reunited with their children if CBP gives them entry into the United States and access to the U.S. asylum system.

The practice of sending kids without their parents is not uncommon, Orta said.

On Monday, Orta said about a dozen people crossed, but all of them had already sent their kids as unaccompanied minors without them by that point. They hoped they would be reunited, but “they didn’t understand that their children wouldn’t be waiting for them 24 hours,” Orta said.

A CBP representative told the Monitor that a May 2022 court order preserving Title 42 is preventing the agency from making more appointments available.

A CBP spokesperson who spoke to The Monitor to provide background information said CBP is limited in the number of appointments it can offer due to a court order from Louisiana.

The Departments of Homeland and Security and Justice have posted the draft text of a new rule that will make it much harder for migrants to request asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The rule would place a “rebuttable presumption of ineligibility” on any asylum seeker who passes through another country en route to the border. In order to avoid being automatically ineligible for asylum, regardless of the threats they may have faced, non-Mexican asylum seekers would have to:

• Apply, using CBP’s “CBP One” smartphone app, for one of a limited number of appointments available at land-border ports of entry. This is very difficult to do, as we noted in a February 17 report and in our February 2 Border Update. Right now, the daily allotment of appointments usually fills up in about two minutes. If all migrants from third countries must use the app, and if the number of appointments doesn’t grow dramatically, then the new rule will create a sort of “super-metering on steroids” process in which only a trickle of protection-seeking migrants is permitted to seek asylum.
• It’s not at all clear that Mexico’s government has agreed to take back an expanded number of rejected asylum-seeking migrants from third countries. The draft rule just refers to Mexico’s “willingness” to take migrants back across the border as long the U.S. government offers other legal pathways to some protection-seeking migrants, like the “humanitarian parole” program the Biden administration is currently offering to the limited number of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who hold passports and have U.S.-based sponsors.

The rule would go into effect once the Title 42 policy terminates, and remain in effect for two years, though it could be prolonged.

Here’s WOLA President Carolina Jiménez’s contribution to a multiple-organization response at the website of the #WelcomeWithDignity campaign.

“It’s impossible to imagine how the Biden administration’s revival of this cruel Trump-era policy could be legal,” said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America. “A federal court struck down a similar measure in 2020. U.S. law clearly provides only two circumstances in which asylum seekers can be excluded by a transit ban: if a ‘safe third country agreement’ exists, or if the migrant was ‘firmly settled’ in another country. These conditions almost never apply. People fleeing violence and persecution have the human right to seek protection regardless of how they arrived. Curtailing access to asylum also sets a dangerous precedent that other countries in the region might model.”