San Diego has released 13,000 migrants onto its streets over the past month as it continues to be overwhelmed by the influx over the border.
As thousands of people continue to be admitted to the US daily under current immigration policies, cities and towns across the southwest are breaking under the enormous strain and officials don’t know how to cope.
San Diego authorities are receiving around 500 people a day and continue to squeeze as many families with children into the limited shelter space it has, but everyone else is dropped off at makeshift transit centers to make their way out of town.
“Many don’t know where they are — that this is San Diego, this is [the] San Diego region, the nearest airport is San Diego and how to get to their final destination,” Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, managing attorney for Immigrant Defender Law Center’s cross-border initiative, told the Associated Press.
“That is what we’re trying to provide support with.”
Migrants who cross into the US and hand themsleves in to border patrol officers are kept in custody for a few days while their paperwork is checked, their identities and fingerprints recorded and they are assesed to see if they have a claim to stay in the US.
After that they are either denied entry and deported, or — as in the case of over two million people since Joe Biden became president — given paperwork and released into the US.
This presents a logistical nightmare for places like San Diego in California or El Paso and Brownsville in Texas as they have to deal with thousands of newly arrived people a week, many of whom have little money to get them to their final destination in the US, wherever that may be.
Reports have previously shown 95% of newly arrived migrants move on from their arrival point in the US with the top destination cities being New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami and Chicago.
Last week, after one San Diego community center reported it could no longer handle the load, border patrol sent drop-offs to “transit centers,” including a parking lot where charities and volunteers tried to provide instructions and shuttle buses to transport people to San Diego Airport or other transit hubs.
Many migrants have family, friends or networks from their hometowns already in the US who help them financially to get to their destinations. There is also help from religious charities and other services, who often run buses or pay for plane tickets.
“It’s a brief moment of intervention before they can move on to be connected with their loved ones,” said Kate Clark, senior director of migrant services for Jewish Family Service of San Diego.
But confusion is rampant among the migrants — one Eritrean migrant arriving in San Diego asked one of the volunteers, “Is California far from here?”
City leaders in both Chicago and New York have complained to President Biden and urged him to do something about the huge influx of migrants to their cities.
New York is seeing up to 600 people arrive a day, despite saying it has no more capacity in the 200 shelters it has opened since the crisis went into overdrive.
About 3,700 migrants flooded the city in the week ending Oct. 1, officials said — adding to the more than 118,400 asylum seekers that have arrived since the spring of 2022.
Chicago currerntly has over 14,000 migrants in its care and had to house people at airports and in police stations to keep up with the influx. However, it now faces a problem of where to put those people once the city’s sub-zero winter temperatures take hold.
With Post wires