For two years, Guerlande Jules Fils has been raising her son alone. The Haitian asylum seeker entered the United States legally using CBP One, a phone app backed by the Biden administration that let immigrants hoping to cross the border schedule appointments with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
For Jules Fils, the decision to leave Haiti was prompted by widespread violence.
“It was a bad situation with the gang members,” she said. “They kill people. My husband decided I should leave and save the baby, and he could come later.”
Jules Fils traveled to Nicaragua, then up to Mexico, where she waited nine months for an appointment to be vetted and interviewed by border agents. After being allowed to cross into Texas in mid-2024, she flew to Boston.
Now, the family’s plan to reunite is no longer possible. Jules Fils’ husband, Wilner Pierre Charles, planned to follow the same immigration process she went through. He made it as far as Mexico and spent three months waiting for an appointment. Then the Trump administration discontinued the CBP One app.
Launched in 2020, the CBP One program was initially for commercial trucking companies to schedule cargo inspections. The app was expanded in 2023 to allow migrants without entry documents to schedule appointments at designated ports of entry on the southern border. Between January 2023 and December 2024, nearly one million people scheduled appointments. Immigrants seeking entry without appointments would typically be turned away.
The app helped ease pressure on the immigration system by setting a limit on the number of people able to access daily appointments with border agents. And the Biden administration argued the app allowed for better vetting of those trying to enter the U.S. With the app’s discontinuation, many immigrants and their families are now stuck.
“Everything is closed, everything is shut down,” said Geralde Gabeau, executive director of Immigrant Family Services Institute in Mattapan, which helped many migrants who used CBP One. “It’s almost like the hope for family reunification is completely out of the picture right now.”
The Trump administration has replaced the CBP One app with “CBP Home,” automatically updating the old app on people’s phones. The rebranded program is being marketed as a self-deportation app for “individuals in the country illegally,” according to the CPB Home website.
“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”
Immigrant advocates argue the change is a ploy meant to trick people into leaving the U.S. Immigrant Family Services Institute has worked with lawyers and activists to educate immigrants about changes to the app.
“So they [immigrants] don’t go and do something that they will regret after. It’s done on purpose. It’s a way for them [the Trump administration] to confuse people so that they can really make the decision that they hope for them to make,” said Gabeau.
Gabeau said that many families IFSI assisted last year went through the CBP One app, and were waiting to be reunified with family coming in the same way.
Jules Fils is one of those people. While waiting for her husband, she and her child have shuffled through the Massachusetts shelter system.
When she first arrived, a friend in the system wanted Jules Fils and her son to stay with them, but didn’t realize that the shelters don’t allow visitors. Instead, Jules Fils was referred to IFSI, where she got help applying for the emergency shelter program herself.
She and her son spent time at the Family Welcome Center at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, then moved to a temporary respite center at a former courthouse in Cambridge. From there it was onto an Airbnb before settling into an apartment in Dorchester. That’s where Jules Fils and her son now share an apartment with another family, paid for with state support.
“It’s not perfect but we do our best,” said Jules Fils.
“I have to use the money that I receive from the Department of Transitional Assistance to pay for the rent and everything. It’s hard. But for my baby and for my husband, I have to fight to stay positive,” she said through a Haitian Creole interpreter. Jules Fils has applied for asylum in the U.S., citing the violence in Haiti, and is waiting for a hearing on her asylum case set for next year.
In the meantime, her husband is stuck waiting in Tapachula, Mexico. Communicating through Whatsapp, Wilner Pierre Charles told GBH News he was shocked by the CBP One cancellation.
“I was really disturbed because I really wanted to come to the U.S. to live with my my wife and my kid,” he said through an interpreter.
Charles said the hardest thing is imagining how Jules Fils has to endure without him.
“I don’t know exactly how my family is living. I know it’s very hard for my wife to do everything by herself. I am really suffering from that problem, from that situation,” he said.
Still, he said he has hope that the Trump administration could reverse course.
“I think there is hope they can do that — because I really want to come to find my family,” he said.
