El Paso, Texas — To reach the U.S. border, Carla Delgado, 23, walked across Panama's treacherous Darién jungle with her husband and four small children. In Mexico, they traveled on top of a freight train known as "the beast," a perilous ride that has caused some migrants to lose limbs or fall to their death.
By any measure, the day the family entered the U.S. was much easier. They lined up alongside several dozen migrants early on a Monday morning at the main bridge connecting El Paso with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. After a few hours of processing, health screenings and background checks, the family was released from U.S. custody with a notice to appear in immigration court, where they will have a chance to apply for asylum.
"I'm happy because thanks to God, we reached our goal, which was to get here," Delgado said after leaving the Customs and Border Protection facility at the Paso del Norte bridge. "We are safer," said her husband, Zahyr Aguirre, 27, who had entered the U.S. days earlier. He noted the family's plan was to fly to Chicago.
The family benefited from a program the Biden administration started earlier this year to discourage unlawful border crossings by allowing migrants to use a phone app to set up an appointment at international bridges, where U.S. officials determine whether they should be allowed into the country to request asylum.
The Biden administration is planning to make the process powered by the app, called CBP One, the main portal to the U.S. asylum system at the southern border, sending the message that those who fail to wait for an appointment and attempt to enter the country without permission will be swiftly turned back.
More than 60,000 asylum-seekers have secured appointments to enter the U.S. since the CBP One app became available to migrants in mid-January, according to unpublished government data. Most of those who have scheduled appointments hail from Venezuela, Haiti, Russia, Mexico, Honduras, Cuba, Chile and Brazil.The app is one component of a revamped border strategy President Biden unveiled in January, along with the expansion of a pandemic-era rule known as Title 42 to expel those who enter the country unlawfully and a sponsor program to admit up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela each month. The policies have so far led to a two-year low in apprehensions of migrants in between official border crossings. But human rights advocates have said the strategy has also fueled an intensifying humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico, where migrants have grown increasingly frustrated by their inability to secure one of several hundred coveted appointments distributed by the U.S. each morning. The plight of those stuck in Mexico was tragically illustrated by a fire inside a Mexican immigration detention facility in Ciudad Juárez last month that killed more than three dozen migrants. The Mexican government has maintained that a protesting migrant started the fire,