When handed a lemon, make lemonade.

At the Trump administration does that, having announced today the introduction of a CBP Home app, recycled from the now-defunct CBP One app.

According to Fox News:

The Trump administration is rolling out a new app to replace the controversial CBP One app with the new replacement designed to facilitate the self-deportation of illegal immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security is announcing the CBP Home app -- which will launch with a self-deportation reporting feature for those in the country illegally. 

It replaces the CBP One app, which was expanded by the Biden administration to allow migrants to schedule appointments at ports of entry to be paroled into the U.S. Hundreds of thousands were paroled into the U.S. as a result. The Trump administration has ended the ability to use the app for that purpose.

All CBP One apps will update to the new CBP Home app.

So from catch-and-release, it's now become scrap-capture-and-go-home. The newly renovated app can be viewed here.

What this tells us is that this is an administration that doesn't waste good work done in the past, which was the creation of the CBP One app, so no sense is throwing away good code -- recall that the rollout of this app was full of bugs, but apparently it works pretty well now. An Israeli defense official once told me the U.S. often throws away a lot of good past technology instead of build on it, so perhaps that signals a recognition of this kind of government waste is also coming to an end. We often focus on fraud, but constantly reinventing the wheel wastes a lot of money, too.

I have no idea whether a lot of illegal migrants will use this or not, illegal immigration, by its very nature, is illegal, and I certainly don't see the career criminals among them doing it. But the app also has a lot of other uses, as the website indicates -- not just intent to depart (so CBP) won't have to come looking for you and you don't get on a 'ban' list for future legal entry, but border wait times, inspection of agricultural products request, washing of boots that have been on overseas farms, hunting trophy inspections, provisional entry requests, and more, so the effort won't be wasted even if the illegals don't show up.

Daniel DiMartino points out a couple things that could even make it better here -- I agree with him, let anyone who wants to go use it and let bygones be bygones.

As they say, there's an app for everything.

Image: Screen shot from DHS government web page // government work