The government chaired by Joe Biden has begun in recent weeks to use a cell phone application to try to cope with the delay in processing thousands of cases of asylum seekers stranded on the Mexican border.
Baptized as CBP One (in reference to the acronym in English for the Customs and Border Protection agency),
this tool has facial recognition services and allows the storage of private information of immigrants who try to access the country
, according to several reports commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security and exclusively revealed by the Los Angeles Times.
[The Biden Administration asks humanitarian organizations for help to select the migrants most in need of asylum]
The Government considers this tool necessary because border officials
"cannot process all the people in one go"
who requested asylum in the United States, but former President Donald Trump sent them back to Mexico to await the resolution of their cases.
Biden last week formalized the end of this policy, informally known as
Stay in Mexico
, but thousands of immigrants are still waiting to know if they can return to the United States after spending months stranded at the border, in danger of being extorted, kidnapped or killed by criminals. .
What form do I have to fill out to withdraw an asylum application?
I already have residence by marriage
June 3, 202101: 28
The Department of Homeland Security considers this app a safe and effective technical solution to deal with this logistical problem, according to the aforementioned newspaper.
His secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, asked Congress for $ 1.2 billion to modernize ports of entry and implement border security technologies to replace the wall policies and legal restrictions carried out by Trump in the past four years.
[ICE documents confirm gynecological abuse at Georgia immigration detention center]
But several experts cited by the newspaper warn of the risk of storing sensitive information about asylum seekers that could later be used to monitor them, since these immigrants have no other option but to accept if they want their applications to be taken into consideration.
Honduran asylum seekers are detained at the border with the United States on December 10, 2018.AP Photo / Rebecca Blackwell
The images of their faces, for example, would serve to track them in the future without their knowledge, denounces Ashley Gorski, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, for its acronym in English).
The Government has already provided this app to several humanitarian organizations that help it filtering immigrants, such as the United Nations agency for Refugees (UNHCR), to verify with biometric data the claims presented by asylum seekers at the border.
[A fraud complaint against a coyote led to the arrest of almost 200 migrants in Mexico]
More than 70,000 immigrants were sent back to Mexico to await the resolution of their cases
.
The Biden government has allowed the entry of more than 11,000 in recent weeks with open cases, and several hundred more in a particularly vulnerable situation, in part thanks to the use of this app.
"My feeling is that it is something the government is seriously planning to use to prosecute people in the future" at the border, said Lee Gelernt of the ACLU.
