Mexico Busing ‘CBP One’ Migrants from Guatemalan Border to U.S. Ports of Entry

I recently theorized that the Mexican government may be moving illegal “other than Mexican” (OTM) migrants who had scheduled interviews at U.S. Southwest border ports of entry using the CBP One app through the country. In fact, a recent article in Border Report reveals that the Mexican government is busing those OTM migrants north to the U.S. border — apparently part of a deal struck with the Biden-Harris administration to hide the true scope of illegal immigration to the United States.

The CBP One App Interview Scheme. On January 5, 2023, the White House issued a fact sheet titled “Biden-⁠Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions”, which explained:

When Title 42 eventually lifts, noncitizens located in Central and Northern Mexico seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry have access to the CBP One mobile application for scheduling an appointment to present themselves for inspection and to initiate a protection claim instead of coming directly to a port of entry to wait. This new feature will significantly reduce wait times and crowds at U.S. ports of entry and allow for safe, orderly, and humane processing.

Many of the “facts” in that “fact sheet” aren’t “factual” per se.

For example, there’s the contention that would-be illegal migrants would only be able to schedule appointments for interviews at the border ports of entry once “Title 42 lifted”, which occurred on May 11, 2023.

In reality, that program had already been ongoing on a limited basis when that announcement was made, as my colleague Todd Bensman reported months earlier, and it was expanded to all would-be migrants just a week after that fact sheet was issued, on January 12.

Moreover, the claim that CBP One app users are “seeking to enter the United States lawfully” is legally and factually untrue. By definition, none of them are seeking lawful entry because they don’t have the documents — visas and passports — needed to be admitted to the United States lawfully.

In any event, CBP currently makes 1,450 CBP One daily interview appointments (529,250 per annum) available to those aliens, and not just for migrants in “Central and Northern Mexico”, anymore.

On August 23, CBP began allowing OTMs “to request and schedule appointments from the Southern Mexico states of Tabasco and Chiapas”. If you’re not familiar with the geographical location of the 31 Mexican states, Tabasco and Chiapas are the two southernmost ones, bordering Guatemala.

As of the end of July, more than 765,000 illegal migrants have made appointments at the ports using CBP One, and congressional disclosures reveal that nearly 96 percent of CBP One migrants have been paroled into the United States — where they will remain indefinitely, if not forever.

There is still a CBP One “dead zone”, however, in the Mexican states immediately north of Tabasco and Chiapas — Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Guererro — before coverage picks up again in Puebla (just south of Mexico City).

All of that raises the question of how OTM migrants who made port appointments using the CBP app after entering Mexico illegally from the Guatemalan side of the border would then transit north to the U.S. Southwest border.

“Mexico Busing Asylum-Seekers to Border Appointments”. I tried to answer that question in an August 19 post discussing CBP’s July border numbers and the then-planned expansion of coverage: “The CBP One app spits out an interview notice migrants can present at the ports, and if I had to make a guess that notice also serves as a de facto transit visa through Mexico”.

It turns out that — as crazy as the Mexican government allowing illegal OTMs to simply traipse through its sovereign territory sounded — I wasn’t going nearly far enough.

The Border Report article I referenced in the first paragraph is captioned “Mexico busing asylum-seekers to border appointments”, and it begins:

The government of Mexico says it will provide safe and free bus rides to asylum-seekers headed to appointments at U.S. ports of entry.

The Ministry of the Interior said a new Emergency Safe Mobility Corridor will focus on ensuring the safety of families who would otherwise be traversing Mexico on their own. Foreign nationals making such a trip often are preyed on by criminals who extort or abuse them, according to migrant advocates and observers in the U.S.

“The objective of the project is to safeguard foreign persons who decide to travel by land to the port of entry where they are expected. Priority will be given to families traveling together,” the ministry and the National Migration Institute (INM) said in a joint communique on Monday.

None of this makes sense, but then the CBP One app expansion to Tabasco and Chiapas doesn’t make much sense either — except as a way for the Biden-Harris administration to hide the actual number of migrants who continue to enter the United States illegally, even as Border Patrol apprehensions have declined in recent months. (This is similar to the “controlled flow” policy in Panama and Costa Rica Bensman wrote about several years ago.)

Start with the fact that if any of those OTMs are truly in need of humanitarian protection, they can — and should — first seek it in Mexico itself.

The United States is not the only country in the world that provides asylum, and in fact Mexico acceded to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention — the international instrument governing such protection — more than 24 years ago.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Report-Mexico-Busing-CBP-One-Migrants-Guatemalan-Border-US-Ports-Entry

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