‘We only got errors’: migrants struggle with asylum claim app at US-Mexico border

The required app often doesn't work - and if it does it may send families a thousand miles along the border for their appointments

When they arrived in Ciudad Juarez on 17 March, across the US-Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, Nestor Quintero and his family were penniless, hungry and homeless. But their primary concern was getting their hands on a smartphone.

The 35-year-old Venezuelan migrant had found out in Tapachula, a city close to the Mexico-Guatemala border, that people hoping to enter the US to ask for asylum needed to secure an appointment through a recently introduced mobile phone app known as CBP One.