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TIJUANA, MEXICO —Hours before sunrise, migrants at one of Mexico's largest shelters wake up and go online, hoping to secure an appointment to seek asylum in the U.S. The daily ritual resembles a race for concert tickets when online sales begin for a major act, as about 100 people glide their thumbs over phone screens.
New appointments are available each day at 6 a.m., but migrants find themselves stymied by error messages from the U.S. government's CBPOne mobile app that's been overloaded since the Biden administration introduced it Jan. 12.
Many can't log in; others are able to enter their information and select a date, only to have the screen freeze at final confirmation. Some get a message saying they must be near a U.S. crossing, despite being in Mexico's largest border city.
At Embajadores de Jesus in Tijuana, only two of more than 1,000 migrants got appointments in the first two weeks, director Gustavo Banda said.
"We're going to continue trying, but it's a failure for us," Erlin Rodriguez of Honduras said after another fruitless run at an appointment for him, his wife and their two children one Sunday before dawn. "There's no hope."
Mareni Montiel of Mexico was elated to select a date and time for her two children - then didn't get a confirmation code.
"Now I'm back to zero," said Montiel, 32, who has been waiting four months at the shelter, where the sound of roosters fills the crisp morning air at the end of a rough, dirt road.
CBPOne replaced an opaque patchwork of exemptions to a public health order known as Title 42 under which the U.S. government has denied migrants' rights to claim asylum since March 2020. People who have come from other countries find themselves in Mexico waiting for an exemption or policy change - unless they try to cross illegally into the U.S.
If it succeeds, CBPOne could be used by asylum-seekers - even if Title 42 is lifted - as a safe, orderly alternative to illegal entry, which reached the highest level ever recorded in the U.S. in December. It could also discourage large camps on Mexico's side of the border, where migrants cling to unrealistic hopes.
But a range of complaints have surfaced:
For CBPOne to work, enough people must get appointments to discourage crossing the border illegally, said Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney and former aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat.
"If these appointments start dragging out to two or three or four months, it's going to be much harder to keep it going," he said. "If people aren't getting through, they won't use the program."
CBP, which schedules appointments up to two weeks out, declines to say how many people are getting in. But Enrique Lucero, director of migrant affairs for the city of Tijuana, said U.S. authorities are accepting 200 daily in San Diego, the largest border crossing. That's about the same as the previous system but well below the number of Ukrainians processed after Russia's invasion last year.
Josue Miranda, 30, has been staying at Embajadores de Jesus for five months and preferred an earlier system of working through advocacy groups. The shelter compiled an internal waiting list that moved slowly but allowed him to know where he stood.
Miranda believed his turn was imminent until the new online portal was introduced. Now, the Salvadoran migrant has no idea when, or if, his chance will come. Still, he plans to keep trying through CBPOne.
"The problem is that the system is saturated and it's chaos," he said after another morning of failed attempts.