Migrants reportedly made millions of attempts to secure an asylum appointment through a phone app popularized by former President Joe Biden in just the past two years.
Asylum seekers made 166 million attempts to secure an appointment with U.S. immigration officials through the CBP One App in the past two years, according to internal documents obtained by CBS News. The CBP One allowed nearly one million foreign nationals to enter the United States before President Donald Trump followed through on a campaign promise Monday and immediately shut down the app.
First established in October 2020 with a very limited scope, the Biden administration greatly expanded the use of CBP One in January 2023. The app has since enabled migrants to schedule appointments to obtain exemptions at ports of entry and permits them to submit biometric data to federal immigration authorities in order to apply for travel authorization and obtain parole.
The app allowed for roughly 1,400 appointments a day along the southern border, a number that was far outpaced by the daily number of appointment requests.
More than 900,000 foreign nationals successfully scheduled appointments through CBP One from January 2023 through the end of December 2024, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Republican critics of the app argued that the Biden administration was using it as a run-around to allow otherwise-inadmissible migrants into the U.S.
President Donald Trump and his team had long pledged to scrap the application upon entering office.
“Senator, if confirmed and I have the opportunity to be secretary, on day one, CBP One will be shut down,” South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, who has been tapped to lead the Department of Homeland Security, said to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley during her confirmation hearing. The governor added that “there’s data and information in there that we will preserve, so that we can ensure we know who’s coming into this country and who’s already here, that we need to go find.”
Immediately after Trump was sworn into office, that promise appears to have already been met. A notice posted on CBP’s website Monday states that the “functionalities of CBP One™ that previously allowed undocumented aliens to submit advance information and schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry is no longer available, and existing appointments have been cancelled.”
The app’s cancellation leaves in limbo roughly 300,000 migrants waiting on the Mexican side of the border who have already secured advanced appointments, according to internal data obtained by CBS News.
In a call with media reporters Monday morning, a spokesperson for the administration said the Trump White House would be declaring a national emergency at the border, designating cartels as terrorist organizations, removing birthright citizenship for individuals born on U.S. soil to illegal migrants parents and taking other border-related executive actions.
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