Trump Cancels CBP One Asylum Appointments On Day One, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That Migrants Were Approaching The Border Through Channels The Federal Government Had Designed For Them

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Monday signed a flurry of immigration executive orders within hours of taking the oath of office, including a measure shutting down CBP One, the federal smartphone application through which the U.S. government had spent nearly two years instructing asylum seekers to schedule appointments at official ports of entry, resolving a long-standing concern within the new administration that migrants were arriving at the southern border in the manner the federal government had previously told them to.

The app, launched by the Biden administration in early 2023 and downloaded by hundreds of thousands of migrants in Mexico, Central America, and South America, had functioned as the principal legal channel through which people fleeing persecution could request a hearing at a U.S. port of entry. By Monday afternoon, the application's existing appointment calendar had been cancelled in full, stranding approximately 30,000 migrants whose appointments had been booked and confirmed prior to the inauguration, many of them sitting in northern Mexican border cities awaiting their assigned dates.

"There is no longer a process," the acting Secretary of Homeland Security told reporters by way of explanation, declining to specify the alternative process by which the United States intended to receive the asylum claims it remains legally obligated under both domestic and international law to receive. Officials confirmed that asylum seekers presenting at the border without a CBP One appointment would now be turned away under a renewed reliance on summary expulsions, the revived Migrant Protection Protocols, and direct removal under a parallel Day One executive order declaring the southern border to be the site of an "invasion."

Migrant advocates noted that the cancellation order arrived without notice, without transition assistance, and without legal mechanism for any of the cancelled families to appeal, recover money paid to attorneys, or recoup travel costs sunk into reaching the ports of entry to which they were now being told they could not present. Several reported that they had spent more than a year working through the app's queue, in some cases moving repeatedly between Mexican cities to maintain housing within reach of the border crossings they had been instructed to use.

The Department of Homeland Security characterized the closure as a clean break from policies that had treated asylum as a process. Sources within the administration acknowledged that the previous CBP One framework had, by design, reduced the number of unscheduled border crossings, which was, they said, exactly the problem.

At press time, the migrants whose appointments had been cancelled were being instructed by the United States government that they should not approach the border, by Mexican authorities that they should leave, and by smugglers that, for the right price, the border could still be approached.