Border expected to be ‘chaotic’ as US ends Covid policy: live updates
The day before Title 42 was due to end, hundreds of migrants gathered on the banks of the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas. Some of them, unable to wait any longer, cut a hole through a fence and made it to American soil before uniformed officers resealed the barricade.
The majority retreated and bided their time. By midnight when the deportation policy ends, Elizabeth Guerra, a migrant from Brazil who described herself as “desperate,” said she planned to turn herself in to US immigration officials.
Expecting thousands more to cross the border, officials in Texan cities like Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso have declared a state of emergency, allowing them to seek more funds from the federal government to transport and house the new arrivals.
Nearly 2,000 people have crossed over in Brownsville alone in recent days, a pattern Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said he had not seen in a decade.
“It strains our capacity,” said Eddie Treviño, the county judge for Cameron County, which includes Brownsville. “There’s an unknown element to what’s going to happen after Title 42 ends.”
According to internal data from The New York Times, more than 11,000 migrants per day have illegally crossed the southern border in the past two days. And the border patrol is already detaining about 10,000 more people than the capacity of its facilities.
El Paso took additional measures and temporarily closed a street near a migrant shelter in downtown.
El Paso area leaders had hoped to avoid an immigration crisis like the one late last year when a wave of migrants overcrowded area shelters, leading to an alarming increase in people sleeping on the streets as temperatures dipped below freezing. dropped. But in recent days, the number of migrants has surpassed the number crossing in December. Thousands of people had overrun shelters and crowded the streets.
The city has converted two vacant schools into shelters and a shelter.
“We’ve never seen this before,” El Paso mayor Oscar Leeser said Wednesday
But those crowds largely emptied after a rare Homeland Security law enforcement operation Tuesday and Wednesday that encouraged undocumented migrants to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol so they could be registered in the immigration system.
Local officials asked the federal government to assist with an estimated 2,500 undocumented migrants who surrounded a local church offering support and assistance. Border police officers handed out leaflets to migrants encouraging them to turn themselves in.
“It wasn’t about chasing people, through the streets to churches, in a conservation area,” said Mr. Ortiz. “It was a very methodical approach.”
Anthony “Scott” Good, the head of the El Paso sector of the border patrol, said nongovernmental organizations assisting the migrants wanted the government to encourage people to turn themselves in by promising not to be deported.
“But we just can’t give that guarantee,” Mr Good said.
So it was a gamble. “People had to trust that the process would work for them,” says Ruben Garcia, executive director of Annunciation House, a large shelter.
In the end, more than 900 migrants turned themselves in and the vast majority were released into the country after processing.
Then, on Thursday morning, the sidewalk around a downtown church, where some 2,500 migrants had camped for days, was clear of all but a few dozen people. Gone were the collapsed cardboard boxes in which the migrants had slept. Gone were the overflowing garbage cans. Alleys that were once teeming with families were almost empty.
Paulo Molina, 25, a Venezuelan migrant, said he waited five hours to get to the front of the line to turn himself in to border police. On Thursday, he was holding a bus ticket to Washington, D.C., as he had been promised a job in a restaurant.
“Thank God I have the papers and now I can go,” he said.
Edgar Sandoval reported from Brownsville, Texas, and Eileen Sullivan, Todd Heisler And Miriam Jordan from El Paso.