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The US Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP)app, CBP One, has some challenges.
The Times of India reports that an independent report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General has found that 358 immigrants used a single California address as their destination in the US.
For over eight months, migrants used the address of the house, a four-bedroom home in Central Valley, to seek appointments through the app. The report warned that the app, which has processed over 765,000 appointments since its launch 18 months ago, is vulnerable to security breaches.
Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, the director of Al Otro Lado’s border rights project, said, “Having an address in the United States is not a legal requirement to seek asylum.” She added that the app imposes an additional burden on asylum seekers by requiring one.
The report said that 266 of the migrants had different last names. The app’s limitations make it challenging to flag such patterns since CBP officers at one port of entry cannot access appointment data from other ports.
Other security flaws have also been uncovered, including migrants creating several accounts to increase their chances of securing an appointment. One case involved an Armenian migrant submitting 466 registrations in a month. Ramos attributed this to desperation, noting, “If we were told our lives depended on an algorithm, of course, we would be involved in multiple accounts.”
CBP stated that new security measures, including cross-border data sharing, were implemented earlier this year. But the OIG has not closed the matter, awaiting further evidence of action from CBP.
