The Travesty of the CBP One App

By Rich Lowry

Monday, October 07, 2024

 

The purpose of the CBP One app is to provide a patina of legality to the mass entry into the United States of otherwise inadmissible aliens, and judging by last week’s VP debate, it’s working.

 

The Margaret Brennan moment of that night should live in debate infamy.

 

As we all know, clearly displeased with J. D. Vance’s answer about Springfield, Ohio, the CBS News host “fact-checked” him by saying that Haitian migrants in the town are legal. When Vance began to point out how that doesn’t mean what it seems to, and started to explain the administration’s CBP One app, Brennan condescendingly thanked him for supposedly reinforcing her point, and then his mic was cut.

 

At issue between the two — and, no, moderators aren’t supposed to be participants in these exchanges — wasn’t a mere detail but the legitimacy of a major Biden initiative to circumvent our immigration laws while hiding the ball.

 

Brennan, we can take it, either doesn’t know the details or takes the view that so long as the administration says illegal immigrants are legal, that settles the matter.

 

The Vance view is that the program is a travesty, and he is correct.

 

Realizing that the border flow, particularly the historic numbers associated with it, was a political problem, the administration figured out a brilliant way to get apprehensions down — by not apprehending people.

 

More than a million migrants have been paroled into the country using the app. Many come through the border ports, but also hundreds of thousands via a program that allows them to fly into the country and gain entry through airports.

 

Launched in 2020, CBP One was intended as a good-government, time-saving tool to manage the legitimate flow of people and goods at the border, but it’s now been twisted to launder illegal immigrants into the country.

 

The only way for otherwise inadmissible aliens to try to get into the country at a port of entry is to download the app, provide the required information, and schedule an appointment. Then, the applicant is more or less guaranteed to get paroled into the country and granted a work permit — almost certainly never to leave again.

 

Many of the migrants who enter illegally between the ports of entry are permitted to get into the country as well — with the crucial difference being that they are counted as part of the illegal-immigration problem; the users of the CBP One app, magically, are not.

 

The limit for the number of migrants who are provided this service has steadily increased. Originally, it was 1,000 a day, then 1,250, and now 1,450.

 

According to congressional figures, 96 percent of the CBP One applicants are paroled into the country, even though everyone knows the vast majority of them are economic migrants, not the victims of persecution.

 

The administration says that the migrants availing themselves of the CBP One app are “seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry.” But this is a falsehood.

 

Just because you show up at a port of entry, it doesn’t mean you have a right to enter the United States.

 

The valid means to get into the country as an alien is to go to a consulate and get a visa. None of the CBP One applicants are doing that, because they can’t.

 

It’s true that coming through a port relieves the alien of the obligation of committing the crime of entering without inspection. This is only happening, though, because the administration is ignoring the law, which requires detaining inadmissible aliens until they are granted asylum or expelled. As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has put it, the message is, “Don’t break the law — we’ll do it for you.”

 

In 1996, Congress changed a perversity in the law, as Art Arthur, also of CIS, points out. It used to be the case that if an alien showed up at a port of entry and was deemed inadmissible, he or she could be excluded with very few rights. But if the same alien made it into the United States illegally without showing up at a port, he or she would get more protections.

 

Congress changed that to treat both inadmissible aliens at ports and inadmissible aliens coming in between the ports the same way.

 

The administration has now, in effect, rewritten the law to invert the port inspection process — which is intended to keep inadmissible aliens out of the United States — into a system under which inadmissible aliens are instead released into the interior. That’s a perversion of the law.

 

None of this makes sense on the merits.

 

As Arthur notes, the administration insisted that it had to do away with President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy because it was too dangerous for migrants to stay in Mexico for the couple of months it might take them to get a hearing. Now, they are staying months in Mexico to get their appointment via the CBP One app. What’s the difference? Obviously, that one process was excluding inadmissible aliens and the other is waving them in.

 

The app facilitates the work of smugglers, who might simply scam migrants or help them exploit the weaknesses in the system. Migrants are only supposed to be scheduling appointments from central and northern Mexico (now expanded to include two southern Mexican states). Appointments can be scheduled 21 days in advance, though, giving migrants and their smugglers plenty of time to make appointments and get to Mexico, no matter where they are coming from.

 

None of this is necessarily widely understood, but one person who does get it is J. D. Vance — you know, the one whose mic was cut.