Note: All quotes from the debate in this post are pulled from CBS News’s transcript, for which I am incredibly grateful.

In the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, J.D. Vance brought up the CBP One app out of nowhere, which has inspired a wave of misinformation spread by people who’d never heard of the app until it was mentioned on their TVs that evening.

One of the hosts, Margaret Brennan, pointed out that Springfield, Ohio, has a “large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status.” This was in contrast to Vance’s repeated characterizations of Haitian migrants in the Springfield area as consumers of other people’s pets (yes, you heard that right) in addition to being in the United States illegally.

The first characterization was made by Donald Trump in his debate with Kamala Harris, and swiftly fact checked by the moderators. But that apparently didn’t sway J.D. from hopping on that particularly virulent train of thought, and riding it straight into Racistville when he got his chance at the podium.

Vance had previously boasted, unrepentantly, that he felt the need to “create stories to bring attention to this” (which most of us would call “lying”) to support both clauses of the fraudulent claim. Not only did the Haitian migrants consume cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio (Vance’s home state), he said, but they only had the opportunity to do so by obtaining resident in the country illegally.

Vance’s competitor Tim Walz referenced that “creating stories” quote, which he said was intended to “vilify a large number of people who were here legally in the community of Springfield.” The context was much back and forth concerning the bipartisan border security bill, which Walz described as “the fairest and toughest bill on immigration that this nation’s seen,” and which was blocked by Senate Republicans in May.

Despite Walz pointing out that Congress “controls the purse strings,” Vance employed a tactic that he used throughout the evening, though he didn’t really get called on it– he portrayed Kamala Harris as responsible for everything that happened, and didn’t happen, during the Biden administration.

Vance repeatedly referred to it as the “Kamala Harris administration,” which probably bummed out Biden to hear– his legacy, already usurped by his aspiring successor! Vance also labeled Harris as the “border czar,” a title that doesn’t actually exist, and which Harris never claimed. Nevertheless, it’s a title that Republicans assigned to Harris a mere two months into the Biden administration, when she was tasked to lead efforts to reduce problems at the border.

She was assigned to work with three Central American countries– El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras– to improve living conditions and thereby lessen the desire of individuals to becomes migrants, fleeing the violence of gangs and corruption. This idea seems like an absolute no-brainer, at least superficially. Don’t we live, after all, in a country whose founding myth revolves around the idea of individuals striking out a perilous path to a better life in a mysterious and distant land, searching for something better?

Needless to say (one would think), Harris is not in charge of the border. She has even acted in direct contradiction to the principle I described above, by adopting a “Stop that” approach to migration in lieu of improving living conditions in migrants’ respective countries of origin. “Do not come,” she said to Guatemalans in 2021. “If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield may have been beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) program, which makes a number of slots available every month for migrants from these countries to seek entry to the county after they have secured a financial sponsor in the United States who applied for a I-134A form, aka a Declaration of Financial Support. These are the people who have agreed to fund a migrant entering country from one of these countries, specifically chosen for the miserable conditions in those countries, whether they’re due to natural, social, or political disasters.

Someone in the CHNV program may use the CBP One app to submit their immigration information from one of those countries to seek an appointment with immigration officials, to minimize the complications that could arise if they simply appeared at the border.

This is not intended as a defense of the app, which should be clear if you bravely waded through my previous overview of the CBP One app. However, the purpose of this feature should be obvious and clear-cut. Indeed, you’d think someone worried about congestion at the border would celebrate a feature that lets people stay at “home” until they’re allowed to come here, rather than congregating somewhere in between.

The other, more broadly applicable feature of the app, to which Vance was clearly referring, allows undocumented travelers arriving at the border by land to submit information prior to doing so– information that, according to the DHS, would be collected at the border during an in-person interaction anyway. Instead, the app benefits the DHS by making the process of gathering this information more efficient, and the benefit to migrants is that….they won’t get trafficked by a mule that way. Apparently.

Once again, please read my previous post for a full background of the app, because it’s just too much to go into here. This post is, at long last, a rebuttal of Vance’s weird choice to bring up the app during the debate. I say “weird” because of the context:

Host Margaret Brennan had just clarified that Springfield actually hosts a large number of Haitian immigrants who are there legally. The part of Vance’s reaction that has spread across the internet is his protestation that “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check!” And yes, that’s indisputably hilarious. But this post is about what came next:

JDV: Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check, and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on. So there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

First of all– if Kamala Harris has an “open border wand,” it must be gathering dust at the back of a closet somewhere– and if so, I would request that she kindly FedEx it to me.

Secondly, this quote touches on a fascinating phenomenon: the idea that immigrants are “illegal” by default, and that if they still somehow manage to enter the country– however that occurs– their legal status is either unchanged (still illegal) or changed deceitfully/incompletely (still illegal, but everyone’s pretending otherwise). How else could someone be an “illegal migrant” when they haven’t yet attempted to enter the country?

For that matter, in a move that’s kind of darkly absurd in this context, the rule implemented by the Biden administration making use of the CBP One app to secure an appointment before crossing the border all but mandatory has the working title “Circumnavigation of Legal Pathways.” As in, the “legal pathway” is using the goddamn app.

Circumnavigating (or avoiding) the legal pathway, then, is not using the app, or one of the other few ways to enter the country legally:

Under the final rule, noncitizens who cross the southwest land border or adjacent coastal borders without authorization after traveling through another country, and without having (1) availed themselves of an existing lawful process, (2) presented at a port of entry at a pre-scheduled time using the CBP One app, or (3) been denied asylum in a third country through which they traveled, are presumed ineligible for asylum unless they meet certain limited exceptions. 

I talked about item 3 elsewhere– basically, it puts the onus on other countries, especially Mexico, to evaluate each migrant’s information to determine whether they should receive asylum status or not, which both places the whole thing out of the migrant’s control and seems bizarre in that it assumes they should expect to receive timely and accurate record-keeping from the government of a country they already have determined isn’t stable enough for them to settle and become residents.

Item 1 is kind of a catch- all that actually includes using the CBP One app, as can be seen from the statement’s prior mention of “putting in place a mechanism for migrants to schedule a time and place to arrive in a safe, orderly, and lawful manner at ports of entry via use of the CBP One mobile app.”

Before proceeding to the obvious conclusion, let’s take a moment to consider the word “parole.” In the context of immigration, parole isn’t criminal justice term. “Parole” is the term for the basis for a migrant’s legal entry into the United States. The CHNV program, for example, is a program that grants parole deferentially (but neither perpetually nor all-inclusively) to citizens of those countries.

As such, the term “parole” indicates that the migrant’s entry into the country is legal. A migrant who uses CBP to secure an appointment at the border is no more an “illegal migrant” than you are an “illegal consumer” for seeking the title confirming that you’ve bought a car. By definition, your receipt of that title is how you acquire ownership of the car legally. You might, by contrast, “circumnavigate legal pathways” by stealing the car. But until or unless you’ve committed actual larceny, you’re not an “illegal” anything.

Asylum has extremely strict requirements, and– by the way– is not something you can specifically request within the CBP One app. It was once possible to do so in order to claim exception to Title 42, the hideous rule that the Trump administration used to exclude all migrants under the guise of defending the country from Covid 19. At that point, you could use the app to specify the “vulnerability criteria” that you meet, which included age, illness, etc. in addition to fear of imminent violence in your nation of origin. But the vulnerability criteria were removed when Title 42 was lifted, and asylum seekers using the CBP One still had to openly state such a fear of returning to their homeland in interviews with CBP and USCIS officers in order to be considered for asylum.

Lastly, we have “the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.” This is an objectively insane statement to make, but I wonder if it even carries any impact at this point, after Republicans have complained about an “open border” during the administrations of Democratic presidents (but not Republican ones, which is odd since they pretty much have the same policies on immigration) since time immemorial. We haven’t had a truly open border since the 1800s (and here I use the term “we” very loosely), and even then, the most open of borders were for people like J.D. Vance.

Vance, and people like Stephen Miller, Trump’s favorite aspiring white supremacist, who took the opportunity to tweet the following:

The app was, in fact, developed during the Trump administration– it launched in October of 2020. Kamala Harris hasn’t had anything to do with its development, which was done in-house by CBP.

The app’s use of facial recognition technology has made it incredibly difficult for some migrants to use, whether for legitimate or illegitimate reasons.

The app doesn’t “accept” or “reject” anything, so who knows where that 95% rate comes from? You have to create an account on Login.gov before you can even use the app, which pretty well prevents “entry on demand.”

Free transportation and free welfare? Via the app? Taking American jobs…via the app?

Wow, this app is more powerful than I, or for that matter its developers, had ever imagined! But not Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris imagined it all along.

Of course.