Illegal Border Crossings Today:

Mobile App Dials Up Risk to Migrants, So CBP Shuts It Down in Laredo

CBP app on iPhone

Barely two weeks after announcing plans to nearly double asylum admissions at the southern border, the Biden administration has stopped taking CBP One phone app appointments at one of the busiest ports of entry. Why? Migrants reported that Mexican officials across the border from Laredo, Texas, detained them and made them miss scheduled appointments with U.S. Customs and Border Protection until they were paid off. Naturally, cartels are also cashing in on the extortion action.

Since Washington started directing asylum seekers to schedule interviews via the CBP One mobile app, the head of Catholic Charities of Laredo says there has been an increase in horrifying accounts of migrants robbed, kidnapped and held for ransom across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

So much for the administration’s “safe, orderly, and humane” phone app asylum process.

Take Rafael Alvarez, for example. The 29-year-old Venezuelan dutifully used the CBP One app prior to landing in Nuevo Laredo this month. At the airport, Mexican immigration authorities seized his travel documents, including a printout of the email confirming his CBP One appointment, and demanded he pay 1,000 Mexican pesos, about $57. He was held with other app-using migrants.

“They would tell us covertly, ‘You’re going to put the money in this envelope and pass it to us,’” Alvarez said, recalling what officials told him and other migrants.

Humanitarian groups in Laredo say they warned CBP of security problems relating to the mobile app. Extortionists exploiting app users is another black eye for the CBP program dogged by technical glitches, as well as questions about its true function.

Even open-border groups applauded the CBP One shutdown in Laredo. Rebecca Solloa, head of the local Catholic Charities branch, said the app was providing an easy platform for cartels to target and extort asylum seekers.

FAIR recently reported that an improbable 99 percent of CBP One users are being allowed to enter the country to pursue asylum claims. Now it turns out that criminal enterprises on the other side of the Rio Grande aren’t letting migrants pass so easily. Chalk this up as yet another way Biden & Co.’s “humane” agenda puts people at risk.