Illegal migrants who are caught and bussed out of the country can use the “CBP One” cellphone app to get government permission to re-enter the United States, border czar Alejandro Mayorkas declared on June 26.
“If an [caught] individual has agreed to and been returned voluntarily [to Mexico], are they eligible for a CBP One appointment? They are,” he told a reporter at his tightly managed Tucson press conference on June 26.
“They don’t want to actually bar people from coming into the country,” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They just want the [illegal migrants] to be laundered through the CBP One process, and this enables them to do that,” he added.
“CBP One” is a smartphone app that allows migrants to request entry into the United States via an official gate, dubbed a “Port of Entry.” Mayorkas’s deputies use the process to give a “parole” legal status to illegal economic migrants. That legal spin helps Mayorkas provide the migrants with the work permits they need to pay off their smuggling debts and bring up their family members.
A migrant uses the CBP One application during an Al Otro Lado training session in Tijuana, Mexico, on Tuesday, Nov. 28 2023. President Biden has argued that he can bring order to the border, while preserving pathways for people to enter the country legally, by taking a more high-tech approach. CBP One is part of the pledge but advocates say the app has crucial flaws. Photographer: Sandy Huffaker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Mayorkas — who was recently impeached by the House — also suggested he has the legal authority to raise the inflow of parole migrants via CBP One, regardless of immigration numbers set by Congress in 1965 and 1990.
“The number of appointments that are permitted through CBP One — approximately 1,400 to 1,500 a day — are based on the capacity of our ports of entry,” he told a reporter. “They are antiquated ports of entry that are also in need of funding to modernize them.”
Mayorkas’s current inflow of 1,500 per day adds up to almost 550,000 a year, or one illegal migrant for every seven American births.
“What he’s saying is, if Congress gives us more money [for improving the Ports of Entry], we will wave in illegal aliens even faster — which is the objection Republicans have been making all along,” Krikorian said. He added:
This administration has created a parallel illegal method of letting people into the country. There are twice as many illegal aliens coming in as legal immigrants, so this ad hoc, bootstrapped immigration system that they’re creating is twice as large as the actual legal immigration system.
The current legal immigration system allows roughly one million migrants, or roughly one extra migrant for every 3.5 American births.
Mayorkas’s migration enables the annual inflow of at least three migrants — or almost one migrant for every American birth.