For President Donald Trump, inheriting a relatively quiet and orderly southern border with Mexico is a political inconvenience. During his campaign, he painted an apocalyptic picture of migrants swarming the frontier, and he returned to the White House organized and ready for border wars, even as U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer and fewer illegal crossings. Shortly after taking the presidential oath Monday, Trump declared a national-security emergency for the border, ordered the military to make plans to “secure” it, and signed a constitutionally questionable executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
Much more telling and immediately consequential, though, was the new administration’s decision to shut down the border agency’s app, CBP One, which had allowed asylum seekers who had not yet crossed into U.S. territory to make appointments at legal ports of entry. Migrants who were waiting in Mexico and expecting to meet with CBP screening officers this week learned that “existing appointments have been canceled.”
Far from preventing chaos, though, killing CBP One could produce more. Then again, Trump’s political interest lies in exploiting the border, not effectively managing it.
This week, social-media platforms were flooded with pictures of crying asylum seekers who had appointments scheduled after Trump’s oath and realized they were out of luck. Those pictures may gratify MAGA diehards, and make some in the Trump coalition think “cry harder.” But migrants don’t simply disappear by wishing them away. The conditions that brought them to the U.S. border didn’t miraculously get less pressing with Trump’s presidency. And people who cannot seek asylum legally in the United States may instead pursue unlawful ways to enter the country.
The president and his supporters would have the public believe that CBP One was an “online concierge service for illegals,” as Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, recently described it. “They made an application to facilitate illegal immigration,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared last week. In fact, CBP One embodied the kind of imperfect but pragmatic compromise that’s essential in immigration policy. The app was introduced under the Trump administration in 2020 to manage cargo-truck crossings at the border. The Biden administration expanded CBP One in 2023, creating a process by which a limited number of migrants could lawfully apply for asylum—which, under federal law, people fleeing persecution in their home countries are allowed to do—while also imposing considerable restrictions on that opportunity.
Previously, people entering the country could assert their intention to seek asylum after presenting themselves to a U.S. official anywhere along the border; they would then typically be paroled into the country while awaiting a hearing on their application, and they could apply for a special permit to work lawfully. Eventually, President Joe Biden concluded, albeit amid intense political pressure, that the asylum system was being overused and that an influx of applicants was swamping the government’s ability to administer it.
After CBP One was established, asylum seekers needed to present themselves at a port of entry (if they could get there) at a specified time (if they could get one of 1,450 appointments available each day). The administration generally declined to hear asylum claims made by any other means. Even as the system created a clear process for seeking asylum—one that, according to the Associated Press, facilitated the entry of nearly a million migrants—it was intentionally designed to curb asylum access and has been much maligned by progressives and immigration advocates for that reason. Indeed, immigrant-rights advocates sued the Biden administration because they viewed the app process as exclusionary to the point of violating federal law.
The recent decline in illegal crossings—the 46,600 illegal crossings in November represented the lowest number in more than four years—is happening partly because Mexico and other countries throughout Latin America are clamping down on migration via their territory. But it’s also because CBP One had helped to end a free-for-all and establish a well-organized line.
Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump was not obviously more effective than other recent presidents in controlling migration flows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lowest number of illegal crossings during his first administration occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In place of CBP One, the new administration has asserted that it will reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which many asylum applicants would have to stay south of the border while their cases are being adjudicated. During Trump’s first term, about 70,000 asylum seekers waited in Mexico for an immigration hearing, and unlawful border crossings were higher than during the Obama administration; the number of illegal crossings in the final months of Trump’s first administration were higher than in the final months of Biden’s.
Trump’s recent moves have unsettled the legal process. This week, immigration-rights groups that have sued the government over CBP One sought an emergency hearing to determine the new administration’s impact on asylum efforts. They had contacted government lawyers to ask about the effect of Trump’s announcements, but those lawyers, according to the plaintiffs’ legal filings, “said they could not provide their position” yet.
The value to Trump of ending CBP One appears to be mostly political. The current situation at the border neither accords with his base’s expectations nor justifies the kind of far-reaching emergency measures that the new president and his allies are intent on pursuing. The asylum process has been thrown back into confusion, and the abolition of legal pathways to asylum increases the incentives for illegal crossings. Ending CBP One conveniently helps lay the groundwork for more aggressive policies. The voters who sent Trump back to the White House may have been appalled by past chaos. For Trump’s anti-immigration offensive, order is a bigger problem.
The post A Quieter Border Didn’t Serve Trump’s Needs appeared first on The Atlantic.
