‘App No Longer Available’: The Disappearance of CBP One

In many ways, it was a day like any other. Visleidys Romero stayed in the shelter, tending to her toddler son’s demands, chitchatting with the other migrants, listlessly waiting for her turn to bathe. For their showers, shelter residents heat up buckets of water using an electric wand; the women bathe together and with their children to save water and time, denying themselves even a moment of privacy.

But this Tuesday in January was not ordinary for Romero. It was the date she had been scheduled to cross the border into the United States and submit her asylum claim. Instead, she would be staying in Juárez, Mexico, just several yards from the Texas borderline. “I tried to do everything the right way, the legal way, following the process on the app, and I thought God would be with me and give me a path,” she said.

A week before, on Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump had shut down the CBP One app, the only mechanism available to seek asylum in the United States. The move left over 30,000 migrants stuck in Mexico with no way to cross into the U.S. and no way to return to their home countries. That figure is likely an undershot, accounting only for migrants who already had scheduled appointments on the app. The true number may be in the hundreds of thousands.

For many migrants who had appointments, the moment they received news of Trump’s order was dramatic. At 10 a.m. sharp, a message appeared on the dashboard of the app, informing everyone that all appointments would be canceled. The mood in the shelter shifted sharply from anxiety to anguish. One representative video went viral on multiple social media sites of a mother, standing with her suitcases, waiting outside a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint for an appointment that would never happen, her eyes shut and her body overcome by sobs.

Francisco, another migrant in the shelter, had an appointment scheduled for that afternoon, but he maintained his composure when the screen went dark, watching as others collapsed into states of extreme distress. The international bridge where migrants met CBP agents for their appointments on the CBP One app is just a 10-minute walk from the shelter. “I was expecting the app to shut down,” he said, “but I missed my appointment by just two hours.”

Adrián Rodríguez, the director of the shelter, described the atmosphere among the residents that day as “an air of complete hopelessness.” Romero had a mental breakdown, sobbing for hours, screaming and pulling her hair out. The other migrants had to calm her down. “I had a stream of tears that wouldn’t stop, and I was just holding my head in my hands for that entire day,” she said. Only the dozen children at the shelter remained unaware that the sky was falling that day, and their parents’ dreams had been destroyed with the click of a button.

Both Francisco and Visleidys traveled from Venezuela, the native country of the majority of the several dozen residents in the shelter, while migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti are also represented in the population. Most of these migrants left home for multiple reasons: because they could not support their children in conditions of economic collapse, because they were facing political repression under authoritarian regimes, because they received death threats from violent criminal groups, and because the United States seemed like the only safe and prosperous place they could imagine. Some have relatives or friends waiting for them in the U.S.; others are in debt to family members for the thousands of dollars necessary to travel across several countries, paying not only transportation costs, but also bribes and fees to the many criminal operatives who control major crossing points in Central America and Mexico.

Visleidys Romero came to the border at the tail end of a years-long pattern. Since January 2020, some 5 million people, most of them from poverty and violence-stricken areas in Latin America, have crossed into the United States through the southern border with Mexico, most of them entering the asylum process. They maintain they need the U.S. government’s protection from unlivable conditions back home.

Over the past five years, the date of one’s journey has held enormous legal significance. If Romero had arrived in Juarez six months earlier, she would have been able to cross the border on foot without an appointment on the app. If she had arrived four years earlier, she might have been shut out due to pandemic-era restrictions. Arbitrary laws limiting how and when people can cross the border, seemingly set to appease consumers of political theater, have changed the course of thousands of migrants’ lives over the past five years. The CBP One app was the Biden administration’s attempt to slow, monitor and regulate the flow of asylum-seekers coming to the southern border in the lead-up to the 2024 elections. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch accused the Biden administration of breaking international law, limiting the legal right to asylum through prioritizing migrants with more means who would have smartphones to use the app and sufficient funds to wait for an appointment through the app’s lottery system.

Migrants would refresh the app every day for months on end, waiting for the randomly generated system to give them a date for an appointment. Once there, they would present their case to CBP officers, cross into the United States and begin the grueling, usually unsuccessful asylum process. Only 1,400 appointments were offered per day, and hundreds of thousands of desperate people sat waiting, enduring a daily cycle of anticipation and disappointment, for their turn.

In June, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order that forbade migrants from seeking asylum if they did not have an appointment on the app. This was the “Biden border crackdown,” an attempt to counter Republicans’ rhetoric that the Biden administration had an “open border policy.” Hundreds of thousands of people were then forced to rely on the app. The longer it took to secure an appointment, the more vulnerable a migrant would be to kidnapping for ransom and extortion in Mexico, which made the app’s arbitrary algorithm something of a religious force to many migrants. It alone decided who got through and when. They prayed to it, cursed it, strategized around it and accommodated it into their routines, relationships and language.

Then, in one moment, on Jan. 20, it was gone.

What had been seen as an unnecessarily cruel, ineffective method of deterrence was suddenly a lost lifeline, the last raft disappearing from view. Experts, meanwhile, noted that the data did not justify the decision.

“The Trump administration inherited a stable border with the lowest level of illegal crossings since prior to the Biden administration going back into the final years of the first Trump administration,” said Doris Meissner, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. immigration policy division, in a briefing. “Dismantling Biden’s border policies, which have brought things to the point that we currently see, could actually increase rather than decrease pressures to cross illegally, because we know that there are significantly large numbers of people who have been waiting in Mexico in order to cross in orderly ways. And those orderly ways have now been eliminated.”

After experiencing death threats, kidnappings and many hungry nights, migrants viewed the disappearance of the app as the end of all mercy.

“It hit me hard, the cancellation of the program [CBP One]. I didn’t want to live anymore,” Romero said. “It took me eight months to get here [to the border].”

Rodríguez tried in the months before Trump’s reelection to prepare the residents of the shelter for the probable termination of the CBP One program. But hope proved to be more powerful than doubt. Even now, despite Rodríguez’s advice to leave behind their dreams of reaching the U.S., many migrants believe Trump will open a similar program to allow asylum-seekers to cross the border. “Something — something has to happen,” says Romero.

In the absence of any system of entry into the United States, Mexican border cities are preparing for a growing humanitarian crisis. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has agreed to accept migrants from other countries in Latin America that do not permit deportation flights from the United States, namely Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. Most of these people will have no means to return to their home countries, and will thus be forced to build lives in Mexico, a country none of them ever intended to live in for longer than the few weeks or months needed to make it to the U.S. border. Even if they could return to their countries of origin, it is often customary to sell everything — houses, cars, motorcycles, furniture — before beginning the journey to the border.

A migrant named Jessica, who traveled to the border with her husband and two young daughters, would rather return to Venezuela, where the family would struggle to put food on the table, than stay in Mexico, where she fears for her life. Along the migrant trail, the family was kidnapped, and their captors offered Jessica a deal in an attempt to buy her 6-year-old daughter.

“I told them they could kill me. I was not going to give up a child,” she said.

Sheinbaum has floated the idea of Mexico funding its own flights to Venezuela for migrants who choose to return, but has not released concrete plans. In the meantime, the Mexican government is preparing to support thousands of so-called “third-country migrants” while they integrate into Mexican society, setting up temporary, high-capacity shelters in several border cities. Justifying her decision to assist citizens of other countries, Sheinbaum said in a speech on Jan. 28 that Mexico is a “humanist” nation. “We are prepared for any possible scenario,” she said.

But migrants who have lived in Mexico for longer stretches, waiting for appointments on the CBP One app, say assimilating into life in the country is difficult if not impossible. Many are not legally permitted to rent property or work in Mexico, leading to chronic financial instability. And in areas with high concentrations of migrants, businesses that offer neighborhood services like laundromats are already beginning to charge foreigners higher prices than Mexican nationals, exacerbating migrants’ struggle to find their feet. Should they receive work permits, migrants in border cities are perhaps most likely to find secure employment in the many factories assembling vehicles or electronics for companies in the United States, the country where they were denied entry.

For now, many migrants languish in shelters; in shady, weekly rented rooms; or in tents on the street, unable to find stable employment where labor abuse is not a daily reality. Romero worked for a day cleaning dishes in a restaurant in Juárez, and when she was done, the boss said it had been a “trial shift,” which she had failed, and she would receive no payment — a common scam affecting migrants in the city. Such experiences are all the more bitter for people like Romero, who have spent all of their savings traveling to the border and now have “not one cent” to their names.

Determined to cross the border, fearing for their lives in Mexico, many migrants would solicit the help of smugglers, but with demand ever increasing, rates have risen to astronomical levels, between $10,000 and $15,000 per person for a trip that often takes 30 minutes or less, from one side of the border to the other. Even if they asked all of their relatives for help with the fee, most migrants, especially those traveling with children, would not be able to pool anywhere near that amount of money. Several weeks after the CBP One app was shut down, Romero says she is coming to terms with her new reality, and the unending hopelessness it entails. Though she is stuck, soon she may be ready to make another attempt to better her life. Both she and her husband are looking for full-time work to save money while they wait for a new pathway into the United States, but have not had any luck. There is no going back, she says. The only direction forward is north.