The new US border wall is an app

A few minutes before 9 a.m. on a day in late March, Keisy Plaza, 39, leans against a wall on the corner of Juárez Avenue and Gardenias Street in Ciudad Juárez. It’s the last intersection before Mexico turns into El Paso, Texas, and a stream of commuters drive past on their way to work and other daily activities that intertwine the two border cities. 

I first met Plaza in a small, crowded shelter a few feet away from the border wall. Originally from Venezuela, she had left her home in Colombia seven months before. She walked a 62-mile stretch of dense mountainous rainforest and swampland called the Darién Gap with two small children and crossed several countries on foot and atop train cars to get to this corner. Her destination is just a few feet away. But instead of walking over to the bridge that serves as an official border crossing and asking for protection in the United States, she just stands there with her 20-year-old daughter, both glued to their phones, as her seven-year-old daughter and three-year-old grandson cry for breakfast and attention. Plaza has been trying every day for weeks to secure an appointment with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) so she can request permission for her family of five to enter the US. So far, she’s had no luck: each time, she’s been met with software errors and frozen screens. When appointment slots do open up, they fill within minutes. 

Plaza has not been the only person to encounter this new obstacle to finding refuge in the United States. At the start of this year, President Biden announced that people at the southern border who want to seek asylum in the US must first request an appointment to meet with an immigration official via a mobile app. The app, called CBP One, had been used by the US Department of Homeland Security since 2020, to let travelers send their information in advance and speed up processing at a port of entry. But in January, the department expanded the app’s use to include people without documentation who are seeking protection from violence, poverty, or persecution. At the time, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas said it was poised to become “one of the many tools and processes this administration is providing for individuals to seek protection in a safe, orderly, and humane manner and to strengthen the security of our borders.”

In the months since, the app has only become more entrenched. On May 11, the US government lifted a pandemic-era public health policy called Title 42 that for a few years enabled officials to rapidly expel migrants from the US. CBP One, which since January had been used to process humanitarian exemptions to the policy, stayed. It is one of just a handful of legal pathways for people seeking protection to enter the US (they may be allowed in if they have been denied asylum in another country, and there is a program that allows successful applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly in directly). At the same time, DHS is implementing harsher consequences for people who don’t use these pathways. Under a new regulation, those who enter the US unlawfully are ineligible for asylum, with few exceptions. The policy so tightly restricts avenues for legal entry that many immigrant rights groups in the US have called it an “asylum ban.” 

“Can you imagine the toll it takes psychologically, thinking every day, ‘Maybe today is the day’?”

Brian Strassburger

For years, the number of migrants and asylum seekers arriving at the southern border seeking protection has been more than what the US government can process at ports of entry. They often wait in precarious places—border cities like Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Reynosa, and Matamoros, where shelters are often at full capacity and migrants are exposed to kidnapping, extortion, and other dangers. Many people are homeless, with no running water, no electricity, no access to school or educational programs for kids, and no guarantee of a hot meal. “Mexico doesn’t recognize this as a humanitarian crisis, but in my opinion, it is a migration crisis that requires resources, services, and a humanitarian response plan,” says Rafael Velásquez, Mexico director of the International Rescue Committee, an organization that helps people affected by crises around the world.

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The app essentially adds one more stop—this time a digital one—in people’s migration route to the US. With a few exceptions, migrants can no longer approach a US immigration officer at the southern border or turn themselves in after crossing to seek protection. Now, they’re supposed to make an appointment online to present at the border if they want their internationally recognized right to seek asylum in the US upheld. But getting an appointment, for many people, has been as challenging as trying to buy a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert on Ticketmaster.   

No one who uses the app knows how long the wait will be. In late May, I caught up with Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest who visits shelters and migrant encampments in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. He knew people who had been using CBP One since the first week of March and still didn’t have an appointment. “They use it every single day,” he said, “so that’s three months of daily stress, of saying, ‘Is today the day I am going to win this lottery?’ Can you imagine the toll it takes psychologically, thinking every day, ‘Maybe today is the day’?” 

Although CBP has expanded the number of appointments available each day on the app and addressed a number of technical issues, immigration rights activists argue that the software itself, no matter how efficient or error-free it becomes, is an unacceptable barrier. To use it, people need a compatible mobile device. They also need a strong internet connection, resources to pay for data, electricity to charge their devices, tech literacy, and other conditions that place the most vulnerable migrants at a disadvantage.

“Technology is not policy, and no matter how many fixes they make to the app … it’s still not a sufficient system for people running for their lives,” says Bilal Askaryar, the interim campaign manager for #WelcomeWithDignity, a coalition of organizations, activists, and asylum seekers that advocates for the rights of immigrants and refugees. “The issue isn’t the glitches and the bugs. The issue is the app itself. That people must have an app to request protection is misunderstanding the dire situation these people are in.”  

DHS maintains that while the situation at the border is challenging and difficult, the department is sticking with its strategy of discouraging people from attempting unauthorized crossings. At the same time, it is making more and more CBP One appointments available: at the beginning of June, the department expanded the number of available slots to 1,250 per day, up from about 750 when the program started. “We have a plan; we are executing on that plan,” Mayorkas said on May 5. “Fundamentally, however, we are working within a broken immigration system that for decades has been in dire need of reform.” 

Immigrant rights groups are mounting legal challenges to the latest policy changes. But while the new rule stands, people contemplating crossing the southern border must make a choice: roll the dice to see if they can enter the country officially, apply for asylum in a country they do not want to settle in (which would make them ineligible to apply in the US), or put their lives at risk by attempting to cross unlawfully.

In late March, thousands of migrants and asylum seekers wandered the streets of downtown Ciudad Juárez, passing time, washing windshields at red lights, and selling candy on the streets. Others charged their phones at one of a handful of free charging stations near the National Women’s Institute downtown, waited in line to enter a food kitchen, or watched as their children played, distancing themselves from the grownups’ troubles. 

Not far from where Plaza was standing, Óscar Fuentes approached a woman selling empanadas to ask her what she had heard from her usual customers. “No appointments,” she replied. Fuentes, who is from Colombia, had been in Juárez for two months. He was renting a small room that he shared with 28 other people, but he counted himself lucky. “Think of all the people that are staying in places that we can’t see,” he said. 

Mexico is a dangerous place. More than 100,000 people have disappeared since 1964, most during the state’s war on drugs that started in 2006. Migrants making their way through the country are especially vulnerable: they risk being kidnapped, extorted, robbed, and murdered along their journey. Those who do make it to the border are not out of danger. On January 26, for example, a 17-year-old from Cuba was shot to death in a hotel in the northern city of Monterrey while waiting for a scheduled appointment. Days later, a 15-year-old Haitian boy died in a Reynosa rental house waiting for an appointment slot, according to local media. 

People seeking asylum in the US don’t have an immigration status in Mexico that would allow them to seek formal employment in the country. Some are picked up off the streets by Mexican immigration officials and detained in facilities that pose dangers of their own. In March, 40 migrants awaiting deportation died in a fire at an immigration detention center in Ciudad Juárez. 

US government officials say that CBP One is achieving its purpose. Instead of trying to cross unlawfully, people waiting at the border are opting to try for a sanctioned passage. Monthly encounters between CBP and people trying to enter without authorization, which reached record highs in 2022, decreased to around 128,877 in January—the first decline since February 2021. The number has increased since then, but it is still lower than in previous years. 

But CBP says it can only process so many people in a day. “We have an operational capacity at ports of entry because we are balancing legitimate trade and travel and other enforcement missions,” a CBP official told MIT Technology Review in April. He explained that the agency is making sure the billions of dollars’ worth of trade that crosses from Mexico into the US is processed smoothly, while still working to catch drug and weapon smuggling: “We have to balance our finite resources.” 

“That people must have an app to request protection is misunderstanding the dire situation these people are in.”

Bilal Askaryar

For those waiting at the border, however, the app represents another chapter in an already rocky story. For many years, the backlog at the border was managed through metering—a simple limit on the number of people who would be accepted for processing. Over time, as US policy shifted, Mexican government officials and civil society organizations began creating informal wait lists to organize the queues of people in Mexican border cities who wanted to seek asylum in the US.

Then, in March 2020, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order under Title 42 of the US code of laws, expediting expulsions, halting the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry, and blocking entry for individuals without valid travel documents. After lawyers and activists filed suit in 2021, the government introduced exceptions that allowed people to request permission to enter the US on humanitarian grounds. Those with a physical or mental illness or disability were potentially eligible for an exception, as were those who lacked safe housing or shelter in Mexico, faced threats of harm there, or were under 21, over 70, or pregnant. 

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The number of people seeking Title 42 exceptions surpassed CBP’s number of daily slots, and the wait lists created by nonprofit organizations grew and proliferated. As of August of last year, there were over 55,000 people on Title 42 exception wait lists across different border cities, according to research by the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Since January, use of CBP One has eliminated the wait lists. But the backlog—and the protracted waits—have continued. Mexican officials and civil society organizations don’t keep track of the numbers, but there could be around 660,000 migrants in Mexico, according to United Nations figures cited by the acting CBP commissioner, Troy Miller. Shelters regularly reach full capacity, and wait times are proving to be long.

The wait-list framework was far from perfect: it was susceptible to fraud, extortion, and the poor judgment of people managing the lists. Still, it was a more humane policy because it was up to people to decide who was eligible for an exception, says Thiago Almeida, head of the Ciudad Juárez field office for the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization that works to ensure the orderly and humane management of migration. With the app, there’s no way to prioritize those most in need. “People who have better access to technology, know how to use it, and have access to faster internet have a better chance to get an appointment,” he says. 

When I spoke with Strassburger in March, he said CBP was effectively “beta-testing the app on people in vulnerable situations.” In the first few months after the rollout of the appointment system, advocates quickly identified problems that made the app difficult or almost impossible to use.

At first, for example, it was available only in English and Spanish, leaving out migrants who speak Haitian Creole, Indigenous languages, and more. Organizations working with migrants also flagged serious issues with the app’s facial recognition feature, which is used to establish that the software is interacting with a real person and not a bot or malicious software.Many people with darker skin tones found that the app failed to register their faces. 

The facial recognition feature began improving with CBP One’s update at the end of February, says Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, director of Sidewalk School, an organization that provides shelter and educational services to migrants and asylum seekers in Tamaulipas. Sidewalk School works with a large population of Haitian migrants and has been calling out the app’s biases against this population from the start. “This whole time, Black people have been left out [of the process],” she says. “That’s crazy!” 

“A lot of the difficulties with live photos have to do with the quality of the image, not with the algorithm looking at those photos,” said the CBP official who spoke with MIT Technology Review. To eliminate some of those problems, CBP decreased the number of live photos required per application, reducing the data bandwidth needed and allowing for a smoother experience with this function. “We saw an increase in the expediency in which someone was able to access the application from when we originally started doing it,” he said. 

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The International Organization for Migration surveyed migrants in Tamaulipas and found that the app seemed to present more issues on Huawei phones. Rumors abounded about potential fixes. Some migrants believed the iPhone’s iOS system works better than Android and that older versions of the app worked better than the most recent updates. When I asked the CBP official about these discussions in April, he said that hardware shouldn’t be an issue. “You just have to have your device updated to the most recent software,” he said. 

Those with hardware that works still need a broadband internet connection to use the app. The Wi-Fi connections in shelters, migrant camps, and hotels are spotty and slow down considerably when hundreds of people try to connect at once. Many migrants buy cellular data instead, spending between 50 and 100 pesos ($2.50 to $5) a day. 

At first, even with a good connection, people faced issues with frozen screens, confirmation emails that never arrived, log-in failures, and errors with the app’s GPS location data. The app tracks users’ location and is designed to work only in central and northern Mexico. Yet some people within range were having issues with this feature; they got error messages indicating that they were too far from a port of entry.

“No one lends their phone here, since everyone is on the lookout for their appointments.”

Norkys A.

By May, Strassburger says, CBP had addressed many of the issues that came with connectivity limitations, but that hasn’t eliminated all barriers. “The app has gotten to a much better place in terms of its functionality,” he says, “but the US government has done everything in its power to funnel people to use the app as their one way of crossing, and yet they have not made it an adequately sufficient avenue.” 

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There are still not enough appointments given the number of people “who are waiting and living in really inhumane conditions,” he says, often facing safety risks in Mexico. The need for a working smartphone with enough battery charge and a good internet connection is “an expense they are having to make as a family, prioritizing that over food on any given day,” he adds. “That continues to be a decision they have to make.”

In the first months after the CBP One app was introduced to make appointments for entry applications, all the slots available for the day opened up at 6 a.m. Pacific time. But people logged in hours earlier. “People are waking up at 3 a.m. these days, because they have to get into that app early. Otherwise the bandwidth overflows and they don’t get their text confirmation to log in,” Strassburger said at the time. 

On May 5, on top of the increase in daily appointments, CBP announced changes to the app that will give users additional time to complete the appointment request. A big source of problems and anxiety for migrants came at this stage of the process, because people had only minutes to confirm their slot—if they were lucky enough to get one—by submitting a photo. If the app had trouble reading the photo or bandwidth problems prevented them from uploading it, time could quickly run out. This happened to Plaza several times. Each time, she says, she was devastated by getting so close but failing. 

Now, instead of making appointments available at the same time each day for a short period, the scheduling system will let people make requests and confirm appointments in two separate steps over the course of two days, essentially giving them a “longer window of time to ask for and to confirm their appointment” and reducing “time pressure and dependency on internet speed and connectivity,” according to a CBP press release announcing the change. CBP also stated that it will work to prioritize people who have waited the longest.

“It’s taken five months and a lot of mistakes, but I think they have made the system better,” says Strassburger. “I just wish they had run way more tests and gone through it a lot more thoroughly so that this sort of procedure had launched in January, as opposed to all the stress and trauma that people were put through because of all the missteps along the way.” 

As of late May, migrants and asylum seekers had managed to schedule more than 122,000 appointments at points of entry along the southern border, according to CBP. Many people are still crossing into the US on their own: in April, CBP encountered 182,114 people entering unlawfully between those ports of entry, up 12% from the number a month before. Nevertheless, though the Biden administration expected a big increase in migrants and asylum seekers at the border upon the end of Title 42 on May 11, that didn’t happen. The government’s increased restrictions and enforcement policies targeting unlawful migration appear to be deterring people from crossing without authorization and encouraging them to use the CBP One app instead.

While some people might get an appointment through CBP One on their first attempt, others may try for weeks or months, depending on their circumstances and their luck. Norkys A., a single mother who left to support her family and church in Venezuela, tried for months to get an appointment in Ciudad Juárez after she arrived on December 26, 2022, with her two teenage children. By March, they were living in a shelter and barely going out. “This confinement is driving us crazy,” she said, speaking from a little nook in the attic where she slept. Backpacks hung from hooks on the walls, and the floors were made of plywood. A few old toys were scattered around for children to play with. “I want to get to the US so my children can start going to school,” she said.

Norkys broke her shoulder while hopping trains to get to Ciudad Juárez. She visited a local clinic, which prescribed painkillers and told her she needs surgery that would cost about $5,000. She didn’t have that kind of money; she didn’t even have enough for a sling to immobilize her arm. Nor did she have a working phone to use CBP One. “I left without a cell phone, money, and food,” she explained. She occasionally tried for an appointment with a borrowed phone, if she could find one. “No one lends their phone here, since everyone is on the lookout for their appointments,” she said. “Their goal is getting across.”

Plaza says that when she was staying in a shelter in Ciudad Juárez in March, she tried the app practically every day, never losing hope that she and her family would eventually get their chance. Seven weeks after arriving in the city, she got her CBP One appointment, at the Paso del Norte port of entry in El Paso, and slowly made her way north to her destination, where she will settle while she awaits her day in immigration court next year. 

Not everyone is choosing to wait. After four months in Ciudad Juárez, Norkys and her two children crossed into the US unlawfully on April 25. They were detained and deportation proceedings were begun, but they were released in Laredo, Texas, and will have the opportunity to appear in court to present their case in an immigration hearing in the near future. While she waits, Norkys is trying to settle into life in the US, relying on shelters and charities to get on her feet. The future remains uncertain, but she is grateful. “As long as we are alive and healthy,” she says, “all is good.” 

Lorena Ríos is a freelance journalist based in Monterrey, Mexico.

Inside Tencent’s weirdly secretive customer service center

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

It’s been a while. I just got back from several weeks in China. It was my first visit since the pandemic, and I noticed some changes: half the cars running on the streets of Shanghai are now powered by electricity; I had to scan my face to ride the high-speed trains; and I did not use a single coin or credit card for my entire trip—digital wallets are accepted literally everywhere.

One of my stops in China was Shenzhen, the southern city that’s home to many Chinese tech companies, like Tencent, Huawei, and DJI. I had several reasons to go to Shenzhen, but there was one that made me nervous: I wanted to go to Tencent’s mysterious customer service center to get my 15-year-old social media account back.

If you didn’t know, the first software that launched Tencent’s empire was QQ, the go-to instant messaging platform in China during the desktop internet era. From there, Tencent grew into a powerful conglomerate offering blogs, email services, music and video streaming, gaming, and eventually WeChat. For a long time before WeChat’s success, a QQ account was essentially a digital identity—people used it to connect with each other and access all kinds of Tencent services. 

I have personal archives—including diary entries, chat histories, and professional emails—in QQ that span more than a decade. But I haven’t been able to access them since November 2021, when my account was suddenly suspended. In the months before that, I had used it to report on a story about QQ’s censorship of LGBTQ content and to connect with sources for other stories I was working on. But it wasn’t clear whether that activity resulted in the suspension. 

I tried to recover my account, but I hit a wall because it was registered with my childhood mobile number, which had long been deactivated. I basically gave up on it—until I learned about the customer service center in Shenzhen.

Dealing with customer service can always be frustrating: long wait times, boilerplate responses, and unhelpful representatives are the norm. Tencent offers a physical center as a last resort. If you are willing to travel to Shenzhen, you can meet with a representative in person to make your case. 

In January, a 16-year-old Chinese teen went viral after he traveled over 800 miles by himself to the Tencent customer service center. Like me, he’d had his QQ account suspended. After months of communications with Tencent and formal complaints that went nowhere, he finally got his account back thanks to his visit.

I arrived at the customer service center on a humid April day. The center is on the first floor of an office building unrelated to Tencent, yet only a few miles away from the company headquarters. It felt weirdly secretive: there was no sign on the exterior signifying what it was. A security guard stood outside the door and was eager to question all passersby about why they were there. 

When I walked into the reception room, six people were in the line in front of me. We were directed to go through a security detector and store all our bags and drinks. No recording, photography, or loud conversations are allowed in this center, the signs on the wall said. I tried to record audio but was soon noticed by one of the three security guards there. “Sir, you cannot record here,” he said, before watching me delete the recording.

After passing through the security screening, I was led to a waiting room, where more security guards—all wearing white shirts and black pants—were watching over the visitors and acting as support staff in instructing people to pre-fill their complaint information, like details of my QQ account to prove I was the rightful owner. 

As I waited on a couch for the Tencent representative to process my case, I was also eavesdropping on fellow visitors in the waiting room. A woman came because her husband had recently returned to China after a long time abroad and couldn’t reactivate his digital wallet. An old man had trouble communicating his case with the guards because he spoke in a thick accent. Another woman, who works as a daigou, or product reseller, was complaining that her WeChat account kept being suspended for sale of counterfeit products, while she insisted she hadn’t done it. A mother came with her 16-year-old son, who had spent over $10,000 on a Tencent-owned mobile game, using her bank account without her approval. The boy, probably knowing he’d messed up, kept staring at the floor and speaking in a low voice while he was reproached by the support staff for not telling them the correct information about his gaming activities.

The people in the center reminded me of how important tech companies have become to daily life in China. Here in the US, you can probably still live comfortably without using any Meta or Google products, but it’s hard to imagine living in China today without coming across WeChat or another Tencent app. 

I felt the imbalance of power between users and Tencent more acutely when I was physically in that Tencent office, being told to comply with different procedures and being watched to make sure I wasn’t taking any photos. And I knew, standing there, that in 2020, a man died by suicide by jumping from the top of that very building. While Tencent denied having had contact with the man that day, a relative of the victim said he went there because his WeChat account had been suspended and he couldn’t get it back after repeated complaints. 

After waiting for an hour and going through some procedures, including taking a video of myself for Tencent’s mandatory facial recognition ID verification system, I got my QQ account back. 

Not everyone in the center was as lucky as I was. The mother who came with her son was told that “a specialist dealing with underage users” would get back to them in a day. “But I took today off to come here and need to return home tomorrow. I won’t be able to come again,” she said. The Tencent staff assured her she would receive a call tomorrow, adding: “You are wasting your time waiting here.” 

The woman whose WeChat account had been suspended over counterfeit sales got into a quarrel with the customer representative. She didn’t believe she’d been reported by the brand (it was Dyson who contacted Tencent, the representative said) but insisted that a foe had snitched on her, and she wanted to know who the snitch was. The argument ended with the woman falling back to the couch, crying that the suspension had basically cost her her livelihood. “I might as well give up this business,” she sobbed. “Things have already been very difficult.”

I didn’t get all the answers I wanted that day. The customer service representative, standing in front of a sign on the wall that read “Tencent: all we do is for our customers,” couldn’t tell me what exactly got my account suspended in the first place. Perhaps it was because I left my contact information in too many group chats, she said, after I explained I mostly used it to find people to interview. “How many group chats is too many?” I asked. “There isn’t an absolute number,” she replied. 

As I was leaving the center, the security guard was still standing in front of the entrance, alert to anyone approaching. A man in a white shirt passed by, and the guard immediately asked what he was here for. “I’m just looking for a bathroom,” he awkwardly answered. After I was a few steps away, I turned around and took a photo of the center. I hope I won’t ever have to come back again.

Have you ever dealt with Tencent’s customer service representatives online or in person? Tell me your experience by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. An ex-executive of ByteDance’s US unit has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the tech company in which he made some juicy claims, including that the company has facilitated bribes to China’s internet regulator. (New York Times $)

2. Chinese police arrested a man for fabricating news of a train crash with the help of ChatGPT, making it the first ChatGPT-related arrest in the country. (The China Project $)

3. TikTok’s Chinese sister app Douyin requires creators to label content generated by artificial intelligence. (Semafor)

4. A former DeepMind researcher compares AI to traditional Chinese medicine: the theory is slim and unsatisfying, but it somehow works. (Wired $)

5. The famed Chinese-Singaporean singer Stefanie Sun is suddenly “releasing” dozens of songs every day. Fans are using AI tools to swap her voice into other popular songs. (TechCrunch)

6. Telecom carriers across the US are required to “rip and replace” their Chinese-made gear, but the costly process is forcing some of them out of business. (New York Times $)

7. A four-year-long landmark lawsuit could decide whether single women in China are permitted to freeze their eggs. (Reuters $)

8. Tesla is recalling 1.1 million cars in China over potential safety risks—almost the entirety of its sales in China since 2019. (CNN)

Lost in translation

On May 12, OPPO, one of the leading Chinese mobile phone companies (it makes 8% of all smartphones in the world), abruptly shut down its microchip business Zeku and laid off its 3,300 employees. According to Chinese tech publication 36Kr, the announcement surprised almost all Zeku employees, since the company hasn’t been in substantial financial troubles.

Established in 2019, Zeku was once regarded as one of a few hopes for Chinese smartphone companies to make their own chips instead of relying on foreign companies like Qualcomm. Before it was shut down, it managed to develop two high-end chip products that are used in OPPO phones, and a third was being tested for production in TSMC factories. The sudden decision has bewildered the Chinese semiconductor industry. One reasonable potential explanation is that OPPO is concerned about sky-high R&D costs while the global smartphone market is headed for a long-term contraction. 

Other Chinese chip companies are racing to grab the top talents coming out of Zeku, but it may take a long time for the industry to absorb all those who were laid off.

One more thing

The latest viral marketing trick in China is to get on a Times Square billboard, as Chinese publication Sixth Tone reported. An 18,000-square-foot LED screen constructed last year has made it possible to broadcast a 15-second video clip in the heart of New York City for only $40. Chinese brands, influencers, or just ordinary people who need an innovative birthday present for their friends soon caught on. Of course, most passersby won’t pay much attention to these videos. It’s all about getting bragging rights on Chinese social media.