One of which could get much worse in the coming weeks. 

Your weekly summary from the Council


 LATEST ANALYSIS 

Florida made headlines last year as it spent flew 50 unwitting migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in a political stunt that has already drawn multiple lawsuits. Now, Florida doubled down by passing a bill last month that authorizes state officials to spend state resources to relocate migrants within the United States. Read More »

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app has the potential to make border processing more efficient. But the recent expansion of CBP One’s functions has been riddled with problems. Its flaws, coupled with the lack of access to appointments, are preventing people from successfully entering the United States to seek protection. Read More »

It’s essential not to see the labor exploitation of migrant children as a sad but unavoidable tragedy. Rather, this is a story about two policy failures—one of which the Biden administration risks making much, much worse in the coming weeks. Read More »


 FACTS YOU SHOULD KNOW  

  • This week, the New York Times broke a horrific story about the labor exploitation of migrant children. In the wake of that report, the Biden administration announced a wide crackdown on migrant child labor and investigations into the companies that employed them.   
     
    Many of these migrant children arrived at the southern border unaccompanied, leaving them more vulnerable to such abuse.  
     
    This policy brief from the American Immigration Council addresses the treatment of unaccompanied children at the border and provides recommendations for building an efficient and humane processing system.  

Read More: Building an Efficient and Humane Processing of Unaccompanied Children


 ACROSS THE NATION  

  • In records recently obtained by the American Immigration Council through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, we’ve learned that CBP forged ahead with CBP One despite the app’s inherent flaws.  
     
    For instance, the app has limited GPS capabilities and consistent problems capturing photos of people with darker skin tones for a “liveness check” that is necessary to obtain an appointment to seek asylum at a port of entry. But the agency has nevertheless pushed for the app to be used for most processing at the U.S.-Mexico border. The documents fail to show whether CBP considered these flaws before forcing asylum seekers to use an app that could fail them.  
     
    In our newly-updated fact sheet, we break down what these new records revealed about CBP One’s functions and the agency’s lack of transparency.  

Read more: Government Documents Reveal Information about the Development of the CBP One App


 QUOTE OF THE WEEK 

We have spent the past decade pouring money into the border-security apparatus in an effort to deter asylum seekers. It hasn’t worked because we’ve spent all of that money on border security and we’ve spent almost none on actually building a functional and working humanitarian-protection system on the back end.  

And now we’ve got a two-million-case backlog, more than six hundred thousand asylum applications with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and three million people on ICE’s non-detained docket. This is not something that you’re going to be able to fix overnight. About the only thing the Biden Administration and Congress could do right now is just declare immigration bankruptcy and start all over again, and have amnesty, but there isn’t the political will for that right now, unfortunately.

– Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Policy Director at the American Immigration Council


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