As illegal crossings drop, the legal challenges over Biden’s US-Mexico border policies grow
Associated PressSAN DIEGO — Immigration advocates said Thursday that an online appointment system to seek asylum at the U.S. border with Mexico is out of reach for many migrants, in the latest legal challenge to the Biden administration’s immigration agenda. “CBP One essentially creates an electronic waitlist that restricts access to the U.S. asylum process to a limited number of privileged migrants,” according to the lawsuit by advocacy groups Al Otro Lado and the Haitian Bridge Alliance and would-be asylum-seekers from Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua and Russia who say they couldn’t get appointments while waiting in Mexico. At the same time, the agency said it continues to serve people “who walk up to a port of entry without an appointment.” The lawsuit is the latest legal threat to the Biden administration’s carrot-and-stick approach to the border that combines new avenues for legal entry, like CBP One, and shuts down routes to asylum for those who enter the country without government permission. “The Biden Administration’s attempt to manage the southern border by app does not meet even the lowest expectation of competency and runs afoul of the laws Congress passed to regulate immigration,” the lawsuit states. Indiana and 17 other states sued the administration on similar grounds, saying in its federal lawsuit filed in North Dakota that new policies “will further degrade our nation’s border security and make it even easier to illegally immigrate into the United States.” Neither case appears headed toward swift resolution.