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| Photographs by Paul Ratje for The WSJ |
As federal immigration authorities continue to release migrants by the thousands, El Paso officials and local charities are near a breaking point in the sprawling border city.
Large groups of migrants, including a large contingent of Nicaraguans who crossed the border on Sunday, have been streaming across the Rio Grande in recent days. U.S. Border Patrol facilities housed more than 5,000 people on Wednesday and roughly 1,700 migrants were released, according to data from the City of El Paso.
“My country is hard; there’s no work and our president is very bad,” Katherine Urbina, a 28-year-old from Nicaragua who was traveling with relatives and friends, said of why she came to the U.S. now. “We can’t buy rice and beans. If you buy one, you can’t buy the other.”
Ms. Urbina said she and relatives were part of the large group that crossed on Sunday and spent several hours standing on the U.S. side of the river, waiting to surrender to Border Patrol so they could ask for asylum.
It is unclear what triggered the latest wave of migrants, but authorities suspect the impending end of Title 42 may be a factor. The law was first used at the border by the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic to block most migrants from being allowed into the U.S. to apply for asylum. Federal authorities have warned that its end could, at least initially, lead to a significant rise in border crossings.
A federal judge has ordered the Biden administration to stop expelling migrants under the law by Dec. 21.
U.S. officials are considering a move to expand a program creating a legal process for Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum to also include Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians, amid the recent surge, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Such a move would allow migrants from those countries to apply from abroad to fly to the U.S. and could slow attempts to cross the Southern border. --->READ MORE HERE
The Texas border city that’s shipped thousands of migrants to cities like New York announced Thursday that the Biden administration has promised it $6 million to help address the massive influx of migrants crossing over from Mexico.
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser also stopped short once again of declaring a state of emergency tied to the expiration Dec. 21 of the Trump-era Title 42 health authority, after which the number of crossings into El Paso is expected reach 5,000 every day — double the current level.
“That’s 150,000 coming through in a single month, and that’s where the federal government and the state will need to help us,” Leeser told reporters.
New York City declared its own state of emergency in October after El Paso sent busloads of Venezuelan migrants to Gotham. As of Thursday night, a total of 10,713 migrants had been dispatched from the border to the Big Apple, according to El Paso’s own tally.
At his own press conference Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams complained about the lack of state or federal support for the city to deal with the influx, saying: “No one has helped us … We have not gotten a dime from anyone.”
By contrast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will reimburse El Paso $3.8 million in expenses incurred between July 1 and Sept. 30 of this year out of a requested $5.1 million — in addition to the $6 million for future migrant operations.
Meanwhile, Leeser declined to rule out using the federal windfall to restart the cross-country bus service, saying: “We might have to do some of the operations we did in September and October, and that’s to help them [migrants] connect to the destination they’re looking for. --->READ MORE HERE
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