Members of the Mexican National Guard patrol Friendship Park in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, on March 16, 2025.
Photographer: Ariana Drehsler for Bloomberg BusinessweekTrump’s App Shutdown Is a Gift to Mexico’s Cartels
CBP One, the app that helped schedule asylum meetings, had critics on both sides of the immigration debate. But it provided a credible alternative to illegal smuggling.
There were few fond obituaries in the American press last week when the Trump administration announced that it was shutting down CBP One, the app immigrants had once been able to use to schedule asylum appointments with US Customs and Border Protection. Even before the administration largely disabled the app in January, immigrant-rights advocates had complained for years that the software was glitchy and difficult to use. They also said it helped officials illegally limit the flow of asylum seekers into the country, while MAGA types tarred it for supposedly making entry too easy.
South of the border, however, the app will be missed. Some immigrants and those who work with them say it provided a rare alternative to Mexican drug cartels’ exploitative, often-violent system of human smuggling and trafficking. For “many, many” asylum seekers with reasonable claims, the app proved to be an essential lifeline and a peaceful substitute for cartel muscle, says Pastor Guillermo Navarrete, who runs the Tijuana side of the Border Church, a weekly Methodist service held on both sides of the rust-colored border wall. As its capabilities expanded over the past couple of years, “it was a surprise from the American government,” Navarrete says, “because it was useful.”