Hundreds of migrants continue to illegally cross the border into California near the remote town of Jacumba Hot Springs daily, who then gather at an unofficial camp to wait for Border Patrol.
People smugglers, known as Coyotes, drive migrants – increasingly those arriving from India and China — to places where there are gaps in the wall on the Mexican side of the border.
From there, they cross into the US and make walk approximately a mile to the camp where humanitarian charity workers offer them water and a cluster of hastily constructed shelters from the elements stand.
Customs and Border Protection officers then arrive and line the migrants and their packs up for inspection. They are then transported to a facility closer to San Diego, which is 60 miles away, where they are processed, with them majority then released into the US to start their asylum claims, according to CBP data.
An eyewitness told The Post: “There was one area the people smugglers dropped everyone off but the Mexican military blocked it, so they moved on and found another.
“Several hundred people are arriving a day. The border officers move people on quickly so there isn’t a build-up of thousands of people at the camp.
“They come with a bus and vans, prioritize the women and children, and take them off for processing.
“There are families here, lots of kids. Lots of Chinese, but also people from many different countries, even as far as Russia.”
Videos have previously circulated of well-dressed Chinese migrants, mostly single men, at the camp lined up with their luggage, preparing to be searched by Border Patrol.
Some have said they followed instructions on how to get to the US by watching videos on Tik Tok.
37,000 Chinese citizens were apprehended illegally crossing the border in 2023 according to CBP, a number which has increased from just 342 caught in 2021.
Sources told News Nation the Chinese migrants pay up to $35,000 to get to the US, much more than the average paid by from Central and South America.
Immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro who has been working with migrants in the area previously told The Post many of the Chinese are “political dissidents” who fly to Mexico then pay smugglers to bring them to the border.
Analysis of immigration data shows over 60% of Chinese asylum seekers were eventually approved between 2001 and 2021, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.