MATAMOROS, Mexico (AP) — Some shelters south of the U.S. border are handling many more migrants now that the Biden administration has stopped processing most asylum requests, while others have yet to see much of a change.
The impact appears to be uneven more than a week after the temporary suspension took effect. Shelters south of Texas and California have plenty of space, while as many as 500 deportations from Arizona each day are straining shelters in the Mexican state of Sonora, their directors say.
“We have to turn people away because we can’t. We don’t have the space for all the people who need shelter,” said Joanna Williams, executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, which can house 100 people at one time. time.
About 120 are at the San Juan Bosco shelter in Nogales, across the border from the Arizona city of the same name, compared to about 40 before the policy change, according to its director, Juan Francisco Loureiro.
“We’ve had a pretty remarkable increase,” Loureiro said Thursday. Most are Mexican, both families and adults. Mexico also agreed to accept deportees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
A shelter in Agua Prieta, a remote town on the border with Douglas, Arizona, also began taking in more Mexican men, women and children last weekend: 40 on Sunday, more than 50 on Monday and then about 30 a day. Like those sent to Nogales, most had entered the U.S. further west, along the Arizona-California state line, said Perla del Angel, a staff member at the Exodus Migrant Attention Center.
But in Tijuana, directors of four major shelters said this week that they have not received a single migrant who has been deported since the asylum ban took effect. Al Otro Lado, a migrant advocacy group, consulted only seven migrants on its first full day of operating an information booth at the main intersection where San Diego migrants are deported.
“What there is now is a lot of uncertainty,” said Paulina Olvera, president of Espacio Migrante, which houses up to 40 people traveling in families, mostly from Mexico, and lets others sleep outside on the sidewalks. “What we have seen so far is the rumors and the impact on people’s mental health. We haven’t seen any returns yet.”
Biden administration officials said last week that thousands have been deported since the new rule took effect on July 5, suspending asylum whenever arrests for illegal crossings reached a threshold of 2,500 in a single day. The officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, were not more specific. The halt will remain in effect until the number of arrests falls below the seven-day daily average of 1,500.
“We are ready to repatriate a record number of people in the coming days,” Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant secretary of homeland security for border and immigration policy, told Spanish-language reporters after the policy was announced.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for figures on Friday, nor did Mexico’s National Immigration Institute.
Mexican authorities have now rounded up unauthorized people and moved them far south of the border zone.
Mexican border towns have been under heavy pressure from previous US policy changes, including the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” plan, which left about 70,000 people in Mexico waiting for hearings in US immigration court. Immigration advocates launched a federal challenge to the Biden administration’s policy change on Wednesday.
Some advocates fear more people will languish in shelters as they try to gain legal access through the CBP One app, which allows 1,450 appointments a day. Some migrants at Espacio Migrante have been trying to get an appointment at CBP One for eight months, Olvera said.
Casa del Migrante in Matamoros is now operating at about half its capacity in a network of shelters across the city that together can house up to 1,600 people. But director Berta Alicia Dominguez expects a bottleneck as more migrants compete for a spot through CBP One, and she is seeking help from the Catholic diocese and nongovernmental organizations.
“Food will become scarce for the migrants and we hope that the organizations can support us in that situation, because feeding 500 people is a real achievement,” Dominguez said.
Piedras Negras lies across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, a flashpoint in Gov. Greg Abbott’s battle with the Biden administration over immigration enforcement. Migration flows there peaked in December, when Casa del Migrante Frontera Digna housed as many as 1,000 migrants.
The shelter had fewer than 150 people on Thursday, but Isabel Turcios, the shelter’s director, worries about the unintended consequences of exempting unaccompanied children from Biden’s order.
“We are afraid that many mothers will send their children alone. That is a big fear that we also have,” Turcios said.
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Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in Tijuana, Mexico, and Maria Verza in Mexico City contributed.
