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EL PASO — U.S. Border Patrol agents are releasing a rising number of migrants onto the streets here to ease overcrowding at a processing center.
Since Sept. 1, the daily average of encounters with migrants has swelled from 900 to more than 1,100 per day, U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Carlos Rivera said.
These numbers are in line with pre-pandemic volumes, but many more immigrants are released into the U.S. rather than being expelled to Mexico, presenting new, urgent challenges, said Rubén García, executive director of Annunciation House, which works with some 14 shelters in the El Paso and New Mexico area.
Local private shelters, said García and Rivera, are filled to capacity and the change in demographics of who is trying to enter the U.S. means certain immigrants, mainly Venezuelans, can’t be easily expelled under a pandemic-related health order known as Title 42.
“Right now, provisional releases are a decompression effort that we’ve had to resort to, due to the fact that all other avenues at the moment are exhausted,” Rivera said.
Title 42 is a Trump-era, pandemic-related health order intended to expel migrants quickly. It carries no legal consequences for multiple attempts to cross the border, which inflates the overall number of apprehensions.
Apprehensions of migrants by the U.S. Border Patrol are on pace to exceed 2 million during the fiscal year ending in September. The agency’s previous records for apprehensions in a year were nearly 1.7 million last year and 1.6 million in 2000.
The Border Patrol’s El Paso sector covers El Paso and Hudspeth counties in West Texas and all of New Mexico. Migrant encounters through July surpassed 228,000, easily surpassing the 195,000 for all of 2021, Rivera said.
The Border Patrol processing center in El Paso is holding three times its capacity, Rivera added. That’s more than 3,500 migrants.
With its detention facility at capacity, the Border Patrol released nearly 500 migrants Wednesday and Thursday. Another 300 are expected to be released Friday, with an undetermined number over the weekend.
Once migrants are released, they generally await a court hearing to petition for asylum or to launch another defense to stay in the U.S., which could take months and sometimes years.
“These people still have an immigration obligation … So yes, it’s not that they are released into the community … without being responsible for reporting and showing up to court,” Rivera said.
Overcrowded shelters
Another complication is that local and regional shelters also are at capacity forcing large groups of migrants to fend for themselves as they mill around bus stations and the local airport, finding a way to get to their destination where they may have sponsors, Rivera said.
Luis Alfonso Cobos, 48, an engineer from Venezuela, has no family or friends that can give him a hand as he tries to start a new life.
He was released Thursday near a downtown bus station and hopes to make it to Houston, where he has heard there are plenty of jobs. “I can work in construction, [as a] painter, roofing or energy, which is what I most know about.”
Cobos left Venezuela about a month ago, via Colombia, the Darian jungle in Panama, Central America and Mexico, fleeing the dire economic situation of his country under President Nicolás Maduro.
“There is no food on the store shelves. No medicine. Nothing. My beloved Venezuela has turned into a catastrophe,” he said.
He said he had spent the last 36 hours on the streets of El Paso.
“I ask forgiveness to the kind people of El Paso,” he said. “We don’t want to scare off anyone. We’ll be out of the way as soon as we can.”
“If you limited me to one word, the word is Venezuela,” said García from Annunciation House, one of the shelters that help migrants. The situation “it’s severe because El Paso has not experienced this,” pointing to Venezuelans who in most cases lack sponsors.
“The challenge with the Venezuela migrants … is [that] a very high percentage of them don’t have a sponsor and they have no place to go, and so that backs everything up.”
García said another challenge is the “lingering problem of COVID,” as many churches are not taking in as many migrants for fear of the pandemic.
“Churches must step up to the challenge,” he urged. “We can’t allow politicians to get involved and use migrants as pawns.”
Asked whether El Paso would seek assistance from the state, County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said, “No.”
City officials had no immediate comment.
In a statement, Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino said the city of El Paso and Office of Emergency Management since 2018 have implemented a plan that provides food, health care services, housing at local shelters or the city’s welcoming center, and helps migrants arrange transportation.
“We are [focused] on the migrants themselves … ensuring they are welcomed at one of the local shelters, our NGOs or our welcoming center,” D’Agostino said.
“If they do not have a sponsor or means to pay for their travel, we have been providing charter buses to where they wish to go. NYC is the location chosen by the vast majority of Venezuelans, which is the group that is largely unsponsored.”
D’Agostino said the city continues to work with the Texas Department of Emergency Management, and has asked for funding support from the federal government.
For weeks, El Paso has been teetering with a rising number of migrants, as smugglers shift from Eagle Pass and Del Rio to West Texas. In previous weeks, the city and county have been busing migrants to New York City, coordinating with faith-based organizations.
The role of helping recently released migrants includes local residents like María Isabel Pineda, who read on social media about migrants wandering the streets of El Paso.
She and her husband showed up at the parking lot of the bus station with at least five boxes of pizza and urged people to eat them “while they’re warm.”
“It comes from the heart. They are human and have every right to be treated with dignity,” she said.
She said she planned to return in the afternoon and “over the weekend and beyond if we have to. We can’t just look the other way,” she said, adding she plans to recruit more volunteers from her circle of friends.