The Patriot Post® · The CBP One App: A Migrant's Ticket In

During her recent CBS “60 Minutes” interview, Kamala Harris was repeatedly pressed by host Bill Whitaker over the mass migration crisis and the Biden administration’s handling of it. It was clearly an uncomfortable issue for Harris, who sought to pass the buck to previous administrations and Congress for failing to pass a (bad) border bill.

To his credit, Whitaker continued the pressure, noting, “But the numbers [of migrants] did quadruple under your watch.” At this point, Harris interrupted, stating, “And the numbers today, because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half.”

Really? We know that politicians are notorious for being deceitful, but some lies are more bald-faced than others. How does Harris make such a claim when the evidence and consequences of mass migration in places like New York City, Chicago, and Springfield, Ohio, are undeniable?

While Harris did a poor job of attempting to defend the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border malfeasance, her claim of halving the flow of illegal immigration can be deemed technically true even though it is essentially false.

This is what Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, explained during his debate with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after CBS News’s Margaret Brennan’s erroneous fact check. As Vance pointed out, “There’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole, and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open-border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card, and waiting for 10 years.”

Despite Walz’s misleading and dismissive claim that “those laws have been on the book since 1990,” the CBP One app wasn’t launched until October 2020.

So, what is the CBP One app? Well, as National Review’s Rich Lowry observes, “The purpose of the CBP One app is to provide a patina of legality to the mass entry into the United States of otherwise inadmissible aliens.”

It wasn’t always that way. Back in 2020, when the CBP One app was first trotted out, the intent was not to use it as a legalization device for illegal aliens but rather as a “time-saving tool to manage the legitimate flow of people and goods at the border” — primarily for scheduling truck inspections. Ironically, the app was intended to help limit illegal immigration, not to expand it or hide its numbers and effects. It did this by putting a limit of 1,000 on the number of migrants allowed through ports of entry.

The CBP One app was also only intended for use at ports of entry. It was not meant to be downloaded by any migrant illegally crossing the border in order to be granted legal asylum status. But that is exactly how CBP One has been exploited by the Biden-Harris administration, beginning in 2023. Many migrants are making asylum claims, and 96% of CBP One applicants are paroled into the U.S. This gives them the veneer of a legal status, which is how Harris can make the ridiculous claim that the administration has cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. That’s only because half of those illegals are now deemed “legal.”

To legally enter the U.S., an individual would need to go to a consulate and apply for a visa. Virtually none of the CBP One applicants are doing this. When migrants download the CBP One app, they have effectively given themselves a ticket into the country. At ports of entry, where everyone is screened to determine whether they have a legitimate right to enter the country, these CBP One applicants are effectively pushed through rather than stopped at the gate in order to determine the legitimacy of their entry claim.

The CBP One app is the reason there are between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants running around Springfield, Ohio. The Biden-Harris administration has combined Biden’s immigrant parole program for citizens from the countries of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with the CBP One app in order to bring in thousands of migrants who would otherwise not be allowed into the country.

Far from doing anything to stop the flow of illegal immigration, Biden and Harris have opened the border even further while denying that is what they have been doing — which is why, when Harris is pressed about the border crisis, she denies reality.