Texas is suing the Biden Administration over its CBP One immigration phone app, claiming it is “illegally pre-approving” foreign aliens to enter the country and “go where they please,” according to the lawsuit.
The federally developed app debuted during the Trump Administration and was expanded in January under Biden.
It offers asylum seekers from various countries a way to send paperwork and present their cases to immigration officials, a right guaranteed under international law, before arriving at the border.
In the run-up to Title 42 ending on May 11, Customs and Border Protection officials saw over 10,000 people a day hand themselves over to them, leaving holding facilities well over capacity.
That number has since dropped to around 4,000 a day, but authorities are still processing the backlog.
Biden also announced a new immigration rule in January that requires any asylum-seeker to apply for protection in any safe third country they traveled through before they arrived in the US.
He claimed if they did not, they would be ineligible to make a refugee claim in the US.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims the CBP One offers a way around the third safe country rule, according to Fox News.
Migrants who do not seek asylum in other countries could still schedule asylum appointments through CBP One, so long as they presented themselves at one of eight designated ports of entry along the US-Mexico border — five of which are in Texas.
Even those without an appointment could just turn themselves and claim they had “extenuating circumstances, significant technical failure, or other applicable exception,” the attorney general stated.
“Joe Biden, [Secretary of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas and the entire Biden Administration have prioritized creating and protecting new ways for illegal aliens to stream into this country, no matter the cost or consequence to struggling American citizens,” said Paxton — who is currently indicted and the target of multiple criminal investigations over claims he abused his position in office.
The Biden Administration has championed the application process as a way to avoid chaos at the southern border and cut down on people sneaking into the US illegally — as illegal immigrants are banned from seeking asylum through the app.
“This Administration has led the largest expansion of legal pathways for protection in decades, and this regulation will encourage migrants to seek access to those pathways instead of arriving unlawfully in the grip of smugglers at the southern border,” Mayorkas said earlier this month.
Cartel organizations have been known to kidnap migrants and even cut off their body parts if they can’t pay the ransoms they set.
An average of 1,070 migrants a day use the CBP One app to schedule appointments since May 11, although not all were granted entry to the country, the feds said.
Most asylum-seekers using the app are from Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba, according to CBP, but most are already in Mexico at the southern border by the time they use the app to apply for sanctuary in the US.
