Asylum seekers face decision to split up families or wait under new border policy

WASHINGTON — Inside a tent near the Rio Grande in Matamorros, Mexico, Jeyson woke up every day for a month before 3 a.m. to fill out applications to request asylum for his family of four through a

U.S. government mobile app.

The 25-year-old from Venezuela eventually secured appointments for himself and his wife, but the slots filled up so quickly that he couldn’t get two more for their children. They weren’t worried though — they had heard about families in similar situations being waved through by border officials.

Instead, he said, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent told them last week that because each member of the family did not have an appointment: “You two can enter, but not your children.” Jeyson asked The Times to withhold his last name out of fear for his family’s safety.

Now many families like Jeyson’s have found themselves confronted with a seemingly impossible decision: Wait indefinitely for enough appointments for the whole family, or split up. It is unclear just how many migrants have been affected.

The CBP One mobile application, which was rolled out last month, was intended to reduce the number of illegal crossings between ports of entry.

Now the only governmentsanctioned way to request humanitarian protection at the border, it requires all members of a family to have confirmed appointments. But with such high demand, families have found it practically impossible to secure enough slots.

Migrants and advocates near the Texas, Arizona and California borders said that initially, CBP agents overlooked the requirement and accepted families as long as at least one person had a registered appointment. Earlier this month, however, as demand for appointments grew, agents began enforcing the policy.

“Now what you have is a system that privileges single people,” said Priscilla Orta, a supervising attorney at Lawyers for Good Government in Brownsville, Texas. “Ticketmaster can let you reserve 10 seats at a time while you wait for tickets to come up. Why not this?”

Migrants in northern Mexico near the U.S. border say they’ve encountered a variety of technical issues while attempting to secure appointments with border agents: Daily appointments run out within minutes on the app, which has been prone to crashing and is unavailable in most languages. Migrants have reported that the facial recognition feature has failed to capture users with darker skin or fidgeting babies.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, said errors during submission are due to appointments no longer being available, not photo issues, and that the feature thwarts scammers who could book appointments to later sell them.

DHS spokesman Luis Miranda said the free app cuts out smugglers, decreases migrant exploitation and improves security and efficiency. He said CBP updated the app this week to make it easier for family units to secure appointments.

“DHS is committed to family unity,” he said.

“The CBP One app is a transparent and publicly accessible way to schedule appointments for migrants seeking to arrive at a land port of entry.”

Seeking asylum is a legal right under U.S. and international law, regardless of how someone arrives on U.S. soil. But under a pandemic-era public health policy called Title

42, migrants are prevented from seeking asylum at the border. On Jan. 12, immigration authorities started allowing migrants to request exceptions to the policy if they met certain “vulnerability criteria” such as having immediate safety or medical concerns.

Use of Title 42 at the border is expected to end on May 23, and officials have said they are negotiating a deal to deport non-mexican migrants to Mexico after that time. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced a policy that would limit asylum access for migrants who cross into the U.S. without authorization and fail to apply for protections on the way to the southern border.

Meanwhile, many migrants live in unsanitary tent encampments without regular access to food and clean water. Human Rights First has tracked more than 13,480 reports of violent attacks on migrants blocked in or expelled to Mexico, including murder, kidnapping and rape, since President Biden took office in January 2021.