U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is working to expand use of a Border Patrol-developed communications application, highlighting the agency’s push to turn technology built by frontline employees into larger operational tools.
James McCament, CBP’s chief digital transformation officer, said Sept. 22 at the ACT-IAC Digital Transformation Summit in Reston, Va., that the Be On the Lookout (BOLO) app is now in use across Uvalde and the Rio Grande Valley sector and is slated for further expansion with Border Patrol.
The app lets agents in the field send alerts directly from government-issued phones. Previously, agents in remote areas would relay information to a station and then have it radioed back out, McCament said.
A Border Patrol agent in Texas originally developed the tool.
“He created the app where those communications could be sent point to point,” McCament said.
In the CBP fiscal year 2025 Digital Transformation Office annual report, which was released in January, the agency said the BOLO app was already in use at nine Border Patrol stations and that its Grass Roots Innovation Team (GRIT) was working to deploy it to additional stations, with a long-term goal of scaling the tool nationwide.
BOLO is one example of CBP’s broader GRIT effort. According to data McCament presented Tuesday, 3,524 employees have created 14,241 applications and 25,665 automations. More than 4.1 million apps have launched as a result.
CBP evaluates locally developed tools to determine whether they solve a location-specific need or could benefit employees elsewhere. McCament said seeing similar solutions or requests emerge across different parts of the agency can signal the need to scale a tool.
“That gives us a better guideline to say we need an enterprise solution,” he said.
“With 14,000 apps, there’s a lot to know about,” McCament said. “We’re trying to make that [process] even smoother for our people.”