• On Friday, restrictive immigration policy Title 42 — instituted by Donald Trump in March 2020 — expired.
• Advocates and attorneys told Insider that new measures from the White House are inadequate.
• That's because the Biden administration is handling almost all asylum claims through a glitchy app.

The fate of tens of thousands of asylum seekers and the efficiency of the US border now rest on a smartphone application that immigration advocates and migrants alike say is glitchy, slow, and causing mass anxiety among migrants who, as of Friday, have the chance to seek asylum again for the first time in over three years.

Friday marked the official end of Title 42, a public health measure imposed by the Trump administration in March 2020. The measure, criticized for years as inhumane by immigration advocates, gave the US government the ability to close ports of entry to asylum seekers and rapidly deport them — effectively pausing the processing of asylum claims for years and stripping thousands of their international right to seek asylum.  

President Joe Biden committed to ending the policy while on the 2020 campaign trail, but ultimately extended its expiry date several times. In recent months, his administration has enacted even more restrictive measures, including allowing migrants to seek asylum at US ports of entry only if they have already sought asylum in any other countries they passed through to reach the US.

Now, the Biden administration has returned to Title 8, a law which, in part, expands access to migrants claiming asylum, while also giving immigration enforcement agencies more tools to rapidly deport people, known as "expedited removals."