During an October 29 segment on The National Desk about the “number of illegal migrant crossings” during President Joe Biden’s administration, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Jan Jeffcoat misleadingly reported that the migrants who used the CBP One app should be included in that number. 

Previously, on October 25, apparently referring to encounters and apprehensions at the border, Jeffcoat claimed that “we're learning as many as 14 million illegal migrants entered the U.S. in the past four years,” mentioning that this number “excludes the 1.3 million migrants who used Biden-Harris parole programs,” of whom at least 420,000 used the CBP One app. Repeat guest Mark Morgan, a senior fellow with the extremist anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform, also appeared on The National Desk on October 15, claiming that the Biden administration had “unlawfully used an app” to “actually make it easier for individuals that should not enter the country to be able to enter the country.” 

Sinclair’s attempts to correlate usage of the CBP One app with increased illegal immigration are not based in reality. 

Since its launch in 2020, the CBP One app has been a tool for the Department of Homeland Security to identify and track asylum-seekers while allowing them to apply for humanitarian parole. The American Immigration Council describes the app as being for “migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum at a port of entry,” as well as being for “Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans seeking to secure travel authorization.” 

The app allows “noncitizens without appropriate documents for admission who seek to travel to the United States through certain southwest border land ports of entry (POEs) the ability to submit information through a module within the application instead of coming directly to wait at a POE”. Nevertheless, only a small portion of users have been admitted as asylum seekers into the U.S. While there have been over 64 million applications submitted through the app, only “813,000 individuals” had “successfully scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry” using CBP One, as of August 2024. 

NBC News has reported that the app has been helpful to those on the border, quoting Texas pastor Abraham Barberi, who claimed the app has “contributed to the decline” in illegal entries. Barberi said, “I think now people think, ‘Well, I don’t have to go all the way to the border, I don’t have to cross the river illegally.'” Forbes also noted that immigration analysts have credited “the ability to use the CBP One app” in helping “reduce unlawful migration from Haiti.”