Lowry: The travesty of the CBP One app

J.D. Vance infamously got his mic cut during the VP debate when he tried to explain the intricacies of the Biden-Harris administration's CBP One app.

What he was getting at — that the app provides a patina of legality to the mass entry into the United States of otherwise inadmissible aliens — was correct.

Realizing that the border flow, particularly the historic numbers associated with it, was a political problem, the administration figured out a brilliant way to get apprehensions down — by not apprehending people.

More than a million migrants have been paroled into the country using the app. Many come through the border ports, but also hundreds of thousands via a program that allows them to fly into the country and gain entry through airports.

Launched in 2020, CBP One was intended as a good-government, time-saving tool to manage the legitimate flow of people and goods at the border, but it's now been twisted to launder illegal immigrants into the country.

The only way for otherwise inadmissible aliens to try to get into the country at a port of entry is to download the app, provide the required information, and schedule an appointment. Then, the applicant is more or less guaranteed to get paroled and granted a work permit — almost certainly never to leave again.

Many of the migrants who enter illegally between the ports of entry are permitted to get into the country as well — with the crucial difference being that they are counted as part of the illegal-immigration problem; the users of the CBP One app, magically, are not.

The limit for the number of migrants who are provided this service has steadily increased, from 1,000 a day, then 1,250, and now 1,450. According to congressional figures, 96% of the CBP One applicants are permitted into the country, even though everyone knows the vast majority of them are economic migrants, not the victims of persecution.

In other words, this is fraud against our system, aided and abetted by the U.S. government.

The administration says that the migrants availing themselves of the CBP One app are "seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry." But this is a falsehood.

Just because you show up at a port of entry, it doesn't mean you have a right to enter the United States.

The valid means to get into the country as an alien is to go to a consulate and get a visa. None of the CBP One applicants are doing that.

It's true that coming through a port relieves the alien of the obligation of committing the crime of entering without inspection. This is only happening, though, because the administration itself is ignoring the law, which requires detaining inadmissible aliens until they are granted asylum or expelled. As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has put it, the message is, "Don't break the law — we'll do it for you."

The administration has, in effect, inverted the port inspection process — meant to keep inadmissible aliens out of the United States — into a system under which inadmissible aliens are instead released into the interior.

As the immigration expert Art Arthur notes, the administration insisted that it had to do away with President Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy because it was too dangerous for asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico for the couple of months it might take them to get a hearing. Now, they are staying months in Mexico to get their appointment via the CBP One app. What's the difference? Obviously, that one process was excluding inadmissible aliens and the other is waving them in.

The app also facilitates the work of smugglers, who might scam migrants or help them exploit the weaknesses in the system.

None of this is necessarily widely understood, but one person who does get it is J.D. Vance — you know, the one whose mic was cut in that debate.