Washington, D.C. (June 8, 2023) – The CBP One app is one of the latest tools the Biden administration is using to funnel illegal immigrants into the United States, while obfuscating the true scope of the border crisis. As Mark Krikorian, host of Parsing Immigration Policy and executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, puts it, the app allows illegal immigrants to “essentially schedule their illegal immigration into the United States.”

Andrew Arthur, the Center’s resident fellow in law and policy and a former immigration judge, joins this week’s podcast to discuss the creation of the CBP One app and how it operates. At its inception during the Covid pandemic in October 2020, the CBP One app was intended to allow legitimate travelers to schedule appointments at ports of entry to limit the amount of time that travelers were spending face-to-face with CBP officers.

However, the Biden administration now uses the app to allow travelers arriving without proper documentation to enter the United States – travelers who normally would have no right to enter the country. Migrants can only make appointments through the app in Mexico and Central America, which has encouraged aspiring illegal immigrants to employ smugglers. There is also now a huge backlog of migrants in Mexico waiting for appointments through the CBP One app.

In his closing commentary, Krikorian highlights the deceptive CBP border numbers released this week. The Biden administration reports a 70 percent reduction in unlawful entries “between ports of entry.” However, closer inspection of the numbers shows that the Biden administration has simply allowed illegal immigrants to enter at ports of entry using the CBP One app, so they appear “legal.”