This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

On an afternoon in early July, Immigration Judge Guy Grande appeared on a television on a wall of the courtroom inside Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and called a man from Mexico up to the front to hear his case.

“I held your case over from this morning because you wanted to just take a removal order,” Grande said, a hint of confusion in his voice. “Is that still the case?”

“Yes,” the man responded in Spanish.

According to Grande, the man had entered the United States in August 2023 using CBP One — a phone application created by the Biden administration that asked asylum seekers to wait for lottery-style appointments to come to ports of entry to request protection — and had a pending asylum appl

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