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Migrants who lost their CBP One parole in the April 2025 email terminations can now ask USCIS to reopen or reconsider decisions that went against them, and they do not have to pay a filing fee to do it. USCIS says the option comes from a Sept. 28 sanctions order in Sileiri Doe v. Department of Homeland Security, the Boston class action in which a federal judge found the mass CBP One parole terminations unlawful. The alert does not reopen anything on its own, so class members have to file.
The fee waiver goes to a problem the court’s first ruling left unsolved. When Judge Allison Burroughs vacated the terminations on March 31, parole was restored on paper. Decisions made while people were treated as having no parole stayed in place. A benefit request denied or closed in that window did not fix itself. The usual way to challenge such a decision is a motion to reopen or reconsider on Form I-290B, Notice of Appeal or Motion, which normally requires a fee.
What was CBP One
CBP One was a smartphone app run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Before it, people fleeing to the U.S. southern border had few ways to ask for asylum at an official border crossing, known as a port of entry. From March 2020, a pandemic-era public health order called Title 42 largely closed ports of entry to asylum seekers for more than three years, so many people instead crossed between ports, meaning they entered on foot through the desert or across the Rio Grande away from any official crossing, then turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. The Biden administration rolled out the CBP One app for asylum seekers in January 2023, letting migrants without entry documents schedule appointments at designated ports of entry on the southern border. When Title 42 ended in May 2023, DHS published a regulation called the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways that made most people who crossed without an appointment ineligible for asylum, essentially requiring the use of the app to seek asylum at the southwest border. Appointments were limited, about 1,450 per day, and many people who kept them were granted parole, a temporary permission to enter and stay in the United States while their immigration cases moved forward. The program ended on the first day of the Trump administration. On Jan. 20, 2025, the app stopped scheduling appointments, and the government cancelled the approximately 30,000 existing appointments held by migrants waiting to access ports of entry. Nothing replaced it as a way to seek asylum at the border. On March 12, 2025, the administration shifted the app’s remaining functions to a new mobile application called CBP Home, which incorporates a function that allows people in the United States to inform CBP of their intent to depart.
Who counts as a CBP One parole class member
Not everyone who used the app qualifies. The class the court certified covers people who scheduled a CBP One appointment, were paroled between May 16, 2023, and Jan. 19, 2025, had that parole ended in April 2025 by a substantially similar email that gave no further explanation, and are still in the United States. NPR reported in April that nearly 900,000 people entered through CBP One during that period. The sources reviewed for this article do not say how many of them meet all four conditions.
The USCIS alert, which sets out how to ask, addresses adjustment of status and notes limited exceptions.
How a parole ruling became a sanctions order
The case turns on process, not on whether DHS may end CBP One parole at all. Burroughs held that DHS ended parole “without observing the process mandated by statute” and its own regulations, NPR reported, and DHS called the ruling “blatant judicial activism.” The court dismissed the claims that went to the substance of the policy for lack of jurisdiction, according to the case docket, and in April it declined to block new terminations. DHS can therefore still end a class member’s parole individually, as long as it follows the required steps. Parole is temporary and discretionary by design, a theme that also runs through USCIS’s plan to drop program-specific re-parole boxes from Form I-131.
The case then became a dispute over compliance. On July 15, the court found that the government had not complied with the March order and said it would use its inherent powers to impose a limited sanction. The sanctions memorandum and order followed on Sept. 28. On Oct. 16, Burroughs refused the government’s request for 21 more days. She ordered it to produce a list of potential class members and a list of people who suffered “adverse consequences” by Oct. 19, and gave it seven extra days, not the 24 it asked for, to set up the remediation process.
What the fee-free reopening can and cannot fix
The burden stays on the applicant. A request to reopen or reconsider is not a new application, and USCIS still has to be persuaded that the earlier decision should be revisited. Class members whose denials turned on a loss of parole are likely to benefit most. People whose cases failed for unrelated reasons will gain little.
Status can still end. Because the court left DHS free to issue individual terminations, a successful reopening may buy time rather than a permanent answer. Class members with pending asylum claims also remain subject to the Board of Immigration Appeals’ recent precedents whatever happens to their parole, including the one covered in the site’s report on advance parole trips and abandoned asylum claims.
Immigration court is a separate system. The USCIS notice covers USCIS decisions. Fees and filings in immigration court follow their own rules, outlined in the site’s guide to EOIR’s payment portal.
The next steps to watch are whether the government met the Oct. 19 list deadline, when the court-ordered notice reaches class members, and whether the government appeals the sanctions order. The docket entries reviewed through Oct. 16 show requests for more time, not a notice of appeal. The CBP One appointment system for migrants was shut down in January 2025, so this class is closed: no one new can join it, and its members’ status now depends on how this one case is carried out.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- USCIS, Litigation-Related Update: Sileiri Doe Class Members May Request Reopening or Reconsideration of an Adverse Decision Without a Fee
- Doe v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-12245 (D. Mass.), court docket
- Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, case record and docket for Doe v. DHS, including the March 31, 2026 class definition and the Oct. 16, 2026 order
- NPR, Federal judge rules DHS illegally stripped immigration status from thousands who entered through CBP One app (April 1, 2026)
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