While Eric Adams becomes more critical of migration, Biden keeps his distance.
Below the tools of the Biden administration Used to ease crowds at the US-Mexico border is a new mobile app that migrants must use before entering the United States to make an appointment with the Border Patrol to file an asylum application.
But migrants have encountered problems securing appointments through the app, called CBP One, which launched earlier this year. The agency has been trying to make over the past few days improvementsincluding increasing the number of appointments available through the app from about 740 to about 1,000 per day.
By the end of Thursday, more than 62,000 people had signed up for the first 1,000 available appointments for May 24. So far, 800 of them have confirmed the appointment, with the largest number of migrants coming from Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela.
While they don’t appear to be new or more pronounced, the ongoing struggles faced by migrants on Thursday suggested that much of the Biden administration’s plan to manage the border still faced challenges in meeting demand.
On the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas, a group of 11 migrants from Venezuela tried to make an appointment Thursday while sitting outside their tents. They refreshed their phones over and over, only to get error messages in response. The system was overwhelmed with thousands of migrants trying to secure appointments and available slots quickly filled up.
“We can’t get in, we don’t understand the new system,” lamented Wendy Perez Peña, 31, who left Venezuela in March to escape poverty.
Jeison Rodriguez Jesus Salas, 27, shook his head in frustration.
“They didn’t update it properly, they should have updated it better,” he said.
None of the group of 11 had been able to get an appointment on Thursday.
Elsewhere along the border, under a blazing sun in Reynosa, Mexico, across from McAllen, Texas, 20-year-old Osiris Yamilet Ochoa had repeatedly tried to make an appointment through the app.
She opened it again on Thursday afternoon and it said in Spanish, “Waiting for an appointment.”
“Everyone is trying to cross into the United States, but we’ve heard that if you cross before your appointment date, it could be considered illegal crossing and could hurt our cause,” Ms. Ochoa said while taking a break from selling gum. on the street to buy baby milk for her 8-month-old daughter, Milagros. “I don’t want to risk it. We’ve been here for three months now. We can wait a few more days.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas denied there were widespread technical issues with the CBP One app. “We use it very effectively,” he said Thursday. The problem, he said, was a lack of human resources to schedule as many interviews as needed.
Shelter operators in Mexico agreed, saying that while the challenges migrants face are daunting for those experiencing them, they do not seem new.
“There is no difference,” said José Luis Elías Rodríguez, the director of Casa de Migrante San Juan Diego y San Francisco de Asís, a shelter in Matamoros. “Some people have made an appointment,” he said. “It’s the same as before, the platform is saturated,” he said – there just weren’t enough appointments.