The administrations of US President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador are forcing thousands of people seeking asylum in the US to wait for months in Mexico, exposing them to danger, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 68-page report, “We Couldn’t Wait: Digital Metering at the US-Mexico Border,” details how the Biden and López Obrador administrations have made a difficult-to-use US government mobile application, CBP One, all but mandatory for people seeking asylum in the United States. The result is de facto “metering,” a practice formalized early in the Trump administration that limits the number of asylum seekers processed at ports of entry each day, turning others back to Mexico.
“The Biden and López Obrador administrations are knowingly exposing migrants to persecution at the hands of cartels that systematically target migrants for kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault,” said Ari Sawyer, US border researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The US and Mexican governments should stop forcing migrants to wait in Mexico and should stop collaborating on rights-abusive immigration policies.”
The report is based on interviews with 128 asylum seekers who were able to share information on the experiences of a total of 263 people, including family members and friends with whom they were traveling, as well as interviews with 13 shelter workers, eight migrant service providers, Mexican government officials, and human rights workers. Because US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) does not provide enough appointments through the app to meet the demand from asylum seekers each day, tens of thousands of people seeking asylum have been compelled to wait in Mexico, often for several months.
CBP’s nearly exclusive use of the CBP One app to process asylum seekers creates additional barriers to access for those seeking asylum, particularly for certain groups. Many asylum seekers do not have cellphones because they cannot afford them or because criminal actors or government agents in Mexico have stolen their phones. When asylum seekers do have phones, their devices often do not have memory space to support the app, they cannot pay for the data they need to use the app, or they do not have access to Wi-Fi.
The Biden asylum rule relies on policies nearly identical to two Trump-era policies—the entry and transit bans—held by federal courts to be illegal. It stipulates that asylum seekers must use CBP One in most cases to access the US asylum system.