Trump, Vance and Musk push lies about immigration app CBP One

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are spreading lies about a mobile app used to assist migrants — and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection — with the asylum process. 

The latest lies align with the Trump campaign’s racist fearmongering about migrants weeks out from the election.

During his debate against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz last week, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, made the following absurd claim:

There’s an application called the CBP One app, where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum and parole, and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.

Trump made a similar claim in Wisconsin last week:

They have an app that’s being used by the cartel leaders — the people that [are] making billions of dollars. The cartel leaders, they can just call the app and they say where to drop the illegal migrants.

Trump has referred to the CBP One app as “the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals,” but the app was actually launched during his administration. And tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is no stranger to peddling conspiracy theories, claimed last week that “it takes less than 5 minutes and zero documentation to get approved” for entry into the United States using the CBP One app.

All of these assertions are flat-out lies. As The Verge explained, the true nature of the app is almost the polar opposite of what Trump and Vance have claimed. The outlet reported:

[I]nstead of being granted immediate status, as Vance claimed, migrants who use CBP One to ask for asylum appointments are simply starting the first step in a legal process that can take months or years — and may ultimately result in a deportation order. These appointments are hard to come by. CBP only takes 1,450 appointments per day across the entire border (up from 1,000 when the app was first rolled out for asylum seekers). Though more than 5 million appointment requests were made on CBP One between January 2023 and February of this year, just 547,000 migrants have been able to get one on the books, according to CBP data. There are reports of migrants waiting up to six months to get an appointment, often in dangerous cities along the US-Mexico border.

In other words, the suggestion that the CBP One app is aiding migrants’ unfettered entry into the U.S. would be a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of migrants who’ve used the app. In reality, many migrants have complained about glitches and other malfunctions on the app that have caused delays in the asylum-seeking process. Migrant rights activists have denounced the app’s collection of biometric data belonging to the migrants who use it. And Haitian and African migrants, whom Trump and Vance have demonized, have claimed the app’s facial recognition software has impeded their immigration process because of its failures to detect darker skin tones. 

In the name of stoking anti-immigrant invective, Trump and Vance are filling the MAGA trough with putrid lies and telling their followers to eat up.