A growing number of border communities are sounding the alarm on the border crisis, as migrants are being dumped onto their streets by Border Patrol, which has maxed out its ability to house recent arrivals.
Leaders in El Paso, Texas, warned they would not be able to keep mass groups of migrants from sleeping on the streets — what the city considers the worst-case scenario — for much longer.
On Thursday alone, some 1,700 migrants entered the US through El Paso in a 24-hour period.
In previous weeks, the city had seen less than 1,000 migrants a day.
“We’re not going to have street releases,” said the city’s Mayor Oscar Leeser during a Friday morning news conference.
“Our No. 1 priority is the safety of our community and the safety of our asylum seekers. We don’t want them sleeping on the streets, but at some point, we will run out of capacity.”
Until now, the city government has been able to delay so-called “street releases,” when migrants who have been screened and processed by Border Patrol get released into the community when the agency runs out of space to hold them.
El Paso shelters that normally take the migrants in are at capacity, telling The Post in August they are “busier than ever.”
Leeser said the city has 400 dedicated hotel rooms every night available for migrants — paid for by federal tax dollars. Sometimes, the need is greater, as it was Thursday night when migrants filled up 700 hotel rooms. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters |
Area nongovernmental organizations are again sounding the alarm on a humanitarian crisis looming at El Paso’s doorstep – fearing U.S. Border Patrol will soon have to release hundreds of migrants to the streets as holding facilities and shelters are bursting at the seams.
Many migrants have already been sleeping on sidewalks, alleys and other public spaces in Downtown, South and South-Central El Paso – some for several weeks – as they time out of shelters or are turned away because of lack of space.
“We’ve lost track of what capacity means,” said Blake Barrow, chief executive director of the Rescue Mission of El Paso, which shelters migrants alongside the area’s homeless. “We are beyond full.”
The El Paso Border Patrol sector is encountering an increased number of migrants, including Wednesday when several small groups crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso and requested asylum at the border wall. Many didn’t make it across, thirsty and begging for water as they walked along the Rio Grande before approaching Texas National Guard troops who stood behind the concertina wire blockade and shouted, “Push them back!”
Adding to that, the El Paso sector is also receiving migrants from other sectors – Tucson and Del Rio – in what Border Patrol calls lateral decompression, agency officials in El Paso confirmed. Border Patrol officials, however, didn’t respond to El Paso Matters’ inquiry about how many people in custody are transfers from other sectors.
Those who are processed by Border Patrol here are released to shelters across El Paso and southern New Mexico or to the county’s Migrant Support Services Center, which helps arrange travel for those with money to pay their own way. Some end up temporarily staying in hotels, which the city pays for with federal funding while it looks to open an emergency migrant shelter at a vacant middle school. --->READ MORE HERE
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