CBP's Migrant App Faces Tech Glitches, Security Flaws: Report

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

The official app which allows illegal immigrants to schedule appointments with the agency at U.S. ports of entry is plagued with technical issues and security vulnerabilities, according to a new report by the Homeland Security watchdog.

The report into the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) phone appointment app known as CBP One was published on Aug. 19 and sent to Congress.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) report examined whether or not CBP adequately planned and implemented the phone app to process migrants who arrive at the southwest border seeking entry into the United States.

The OIG found that while CBP initially addressed weaknesses in the app after its implementation, the agency failed to formally assess and mitigate the “technological risks involved with expanding the application” to allow immigrants to schedule appointments to present themselves for processing at the Southwest Border.”

“We found that CBP did not initially consider critical factors such as the design of the CBP One Genuine Presence functionality, adequacy of supporting application infrastructure, sufficiency of language translations, and equity of appointment distribution,” the report states.

“As a result, noncitizens initially using the new feature experienced application crashes, received frequent error messages, faced language barriers, and may not have always had an equal opportunity to secure an appointment,” it continues.

CBP’s One phone app was created in 2020 to serve as a single portal for various CBP services.

However, it was expanded in January 2023 under President Joe Biden’s administration to allow immigrants seeking to enter the United States to submit information and schedule appointments before arriving at one of eight points of entry along the southwest border.

The expansion was part of the administration’s efforts to discourage illegal border crossings by providing legal pathways.

According to a July press release from CBP, the app has “increased CBP’s capacity to process immigrants more efficiently and orderly while cutting out unscrupulous smugglers who endanger and profit from vulnerable migrants.”

In July alone, the federal agency processed over 38,000 individuals with appointments at ports of entry through the app.

Since the app’s appointment-scheduling function was introduced in January 2023 through the end of July 2024, more than 765,000 individuals have “successfully scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry instead of risking their lives in the hands of smugglers,” CBP said.

Security Vulnerabilities, Identical Address Claims

However, the OIG said it found CBP may also be failing to use information submitted to the app by immigrants before they arrive at the border to improve pre-arrival vetting procedures.

While the agency uses biographic and biometric information submitted into the app in advance to determine whether arriving migrants have “derogatory records,” it “does not leverage the information to identify suspicious trends as part of its pre-arrival vetting procedures,” according to the report.

Elsewhere, the OIG said it had identified potentially unrelated immigrants who repeatedly claimed identical intended U.S. residences.

“CBP currently does not have a mechanism to routinely analyze CBP One data submitted across the eligible POEs [points of entry] for trends, which may be useful intelligence to help guide front-line CBP officers when interviewing noncitizens during appointment processing,” the report said.

Meanwhile, the OIG report found security vulnerabilities within the application and its supporting infrastructure operating systems.

“Without a process to ensure all corrective security patches are timely implemented and assets are properly configured, data on the app may be susceptible to exploitation or cyber-attacks,” the report found.

“This process is especially important as CBP continues to update the application,” it added.

In concluding its report, the OIG recommended that CBP develop and implement a formalized risk assessment process when developing, expanding, or modifying mobile applications.

It also recommended that it introduce a mechanism to analyze the app’s advanced information for trends and patterns of fraudulent behaviors by users and communicate those results to the eight ports of entry that process appointments booked through the app.

The OIG further recommended that CBP introduce a mechanism to routinely assess CBP applications and supporting infrastructure operating systems for vulnerabilities and ensure corrective actions are undertaken in a timely manner.

CBP concurred with all three recommendations and promised to take corrective actions, according to the report.

The Epoch Times has contacted CBP for comment.