Asylum Seekers Left Stranded After Trump Terminates CBP One App

The Trump administration shut down the app to prevent migrants without visas from entering the US

Trump Immigration CBP One

A migrant seeking asylum holds up the CBP One app showing his appointment was canceled after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Matamoros, Mexico. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

President Trump‘s term as the 47th President of the U.S. has barely begun but it’s clear he’s planning on making sweeping changes that will affect migrants and asylum seekers. This will include working to undo or rescind many of former President Biden‘s executive orders in favor of anti-immigrant policies, including carrying out mass immigration sweeps in major cities like Chicago next week. Most recently, within minutes of taking office this week, his administration shut down the CBP One App, an online platform where people could reserve appointments in order to begin the legal process of immigration while still in their home countries. Along with the app shutdown, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) also cancelled outstanding appointments that had been set by migrants without visas, yet who had planned to go through legal ports of entry to enter the U.S, The Hill reported. The app operated essentially like a lottery, providing appointments to 1,450 people a day at one of eight border crossings.

Four hundred people in Tijuana were admitted daily on the app at a border crossing with San Diego, among them was Colombian refugee Maria Mercado who fled to Ecuador due to cartel violence only to leave again in June to Mexico in the hopes of entering the U.S. Her family’s appointment was at 1 p.m., four hours after the termination of the app, the Associated Press reported.

“We don’t know what we are going to do,” she told the AP, with tears running down her face. “I’m not asking the world for anything — only God. I’m asking God to please let us get in.”

The CBP One App was originally launched in 2020, though its sole purpose at the time was for commercial trucking companies to schedule appointments for cargo inspections. Three years later, the Biden administration announced that the app would be the only way for migrants to request asylum and book appointments with CBP officials, mostly as an attempt to slow the influx of illegal entry at the border. Since that time, nearly one million people scheduled appointments on the app, though it quickly presented issues. Unprepared for demand, it was deemed hard to use and vulnerable to crashing by many. It also did not list enough appointment slots for the number of people requesting them and offered lengthy screening times. Thousands more, including the 280,000 people who’d been logging into the app everyday in January, have now been affected by the app’s complete shutdown, Reuters reported.

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However, despite President Trump’s claims, CBP numbers report that in the past year migration has actually decreased. This past December, CBP encountered 96,048 migrants at the border, half of whom attempted migration at legal ports of entry, The Hill reported. These numbers haven’t been that high since January 2021 during former President Biden’s inauguration, whose administration brought in about 8 million migrants over the past four years.

But it seems that the data will not be enough to stop President Trump’s total of eleven new anti-immigrant policies, which he will likely implement as part of his first days in office. This has including sending troops to the border to minimize illegal immigration; using the Alien Enemies Act, first used to round up Japanese Americans in internment camps, to designate migrant gangs as terrorist organizations; ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S.; ending mass humanitarian parole for Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants; ending Biden’s “catch and release” policies that mandated that migrants caught at the border be allowed into the U.S.; forcing migrants to wait outside the U.S. until their immigration hearings; and resuming construction on the shared border wall with Mexico.

It remains to be seen if any of President Trump’s policies will hold up in court but for now, it’s clear that the next four years will be challenging to migrants and asylum seekers in the U.S.

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