America’s migrant crisis is shifting from the Texas-California border

SAN DIEGO – On a blustery morning last month, volunteer Adriana Jasso raised the flaps of a tent propped up against the massive steel bars of the fence that spans this stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border.

On her side were plastic tables piled with apples, cartons of hot chocolate, mylar blankets and piles of ponchos — supplies waiting for hungry and tired migrants who had traveled for weeks or even months to reach California.

On the other side, visible through the gaps in the towering barrier, a group of more than a hundred people — from countries including Ecuador, Colombia, China and Rwanda — huddled, waiting to be allowed through to U.S. territory.

This border point south of San Diego is now one of the busiest along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, which extends approximately 2,000 miles (3,140 km) from here to eastern Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.

A record wave of illegal border crossings in recent years has fueled debate over immigration and border security, becoming a major concern for voters ahead of the US presidential election in November.

While the border crisis has focused on Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has battled President Joe Biden over his immigration policies, recent figures show the geography of America’s migration problem is shifting west to border states like Arizona and California .

In San Ysidro, about 16 miles south of wealthy San Diego, crossings were up 85% in February from the previous year, compared with Texas, where illegal entries fell over the same period.

The BBC’s US partner CBS reported that there were a few hundred apprehensions a day at the Del Rio, Texas, border crossing in January – compared to 2,300 daily migrant crossings in December.

The shift in the flow of migrants is partly due to the tough approach to illegal migration by the governor of Texas and the tightened security measures taken by the Mexican authorities on the other side of the border.

The sheer number of people arriving has overwhelmed resources in the San Diego area; After migrants are picked up and processed at a facility near the border, local officials told the BBC that up to 1,000 people a day are being released at city train and bus stops.

Just after 8 a.m., Border Patrol agents arrived and opened the gate to begin capturing the strip of land where migrants have been waiting. Men may wear only one layer of clothing, women and children two; they line up and take off jackets and shoelaces (which are not allowed in the processing center due to safety concerns) and pack them in plastic bags or backpacks.

From there they are taken by bus to a processing center, where they are registered and can submit an asylum application. The vast majority go to towns and cities in the US, where they have family, friends and networks.

The influx of migrants scattered across the country has strained communities, frustrated local officials and put immigration at the top of the political agenda. In a Wall Street Journal poll published in March, immigration was among the top two issues for registered voters in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

At least 72% of voters in the seven states said the nation’s immigration policies and border security were heading in the wrong direction, the survey found.

Even in California, the nation’s largest Democratic stronghold, 62% of registered voters said U.S. borders were not secure in terms of preventing illegal border crossings, compared with 30% who said they were safe, according to a survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies published in January.

Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has accused Biden of creating a “bloodbath” at the US-Mexico border. The president accused Trump of obstructing a bipartisan immigration bill for political gain.

The border had a major impact during President Trump’s term, with his administration building approximately 15 miles of new barriers and strengthening or increasing the height along another 350 miles of the existing border wall structure.

That includes near San Diego, where the Trump administration in 2019 completed a fence jutting into the Pacific Ocean along a stretch of beach just north of Tijuana, Mexico, to prevent migrants from swimming into the country. According to a study published in the medical journal JAMA, this has led to a significant increase in drowning deaths among migrants.

Nora Vargas, chair of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, has witnessed the ups and downs of migration in recent years. Since the Biden administration in May 2023 lifted Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allowed U.S. officials to expel migrants coming to the border, Vargas said about 80,000 migrants have arrived through San Diego County.

The Biden administration’s attempt to prevent migrants from crossing the border illegally and encourage them to seek asylum through an app has been plagued by technical problems, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down the number of people crossing the border slowed down, due to push factors such as violence and poverty. Vargas said.

“We need to be able to find ways to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect, especially when you are fleeing persecution,” she said.

Vargas told the BBC that her province had an effective solution to ease the crisis: migrant transition centers, or short-term facilities where newly arrived migrants can access food and medical treatment, charge their phones and plan their next steps. arriving are not. to stay. Instead, they move to other towns and cities in the US, where they have a network of family or friends.

But as the number of asylum seekers arriving each day increased, the province lost its funding. Vargas wrote an urgent letter to the White House in February, asking for federal assistance to cover the estimated $1.5 million per month needed to operate the facilities.

However, the financing did not materialize. The province was forced to close the transition center. Vargas faulted Congress for failing to pass the Senate’s bipartisan package of measures, including funding to address the immigration crisis at the border.

Lacking transition centers, Border Patrol agents are now dropping off about 900 people a day at bus and train stations in San Diego, a city of about 1.3 million. At the Iris Avenue Transit Center on a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, a swelling crowd of migrants milled about, exhausted and relieved.

Men and women from Brazil, India, China and Latin America called relatives and consulted maps, trying to plot a route to their final destination. A group of young men from Guinea told the BBC they had fled political instability. They had flown first to Istanbul, then to Colombia and then to the US.

“No one wants to leave their home,” said a young woman from Ecuador, blaming gangs and mafia groups in her home country for creating an atmosphere of fear and violence.

Two men from Medellín, Colombia, told the BBC that they had traveled to the US to find work.

Jim Desmond, a member of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, recently visited the Iris Transit Center and told the BBC that nonprofits help many migrants get to the airport, where they hope to get a ticket to their final destination. Now the airport itself is becoming a shelter, he says.

“For tourists to come, you know they’ve taken a flight or they’re leaving, we don’t want it to be their first or last impression, to see people sleeping and staying overnight at the San Diego airport,” he said.

Desmond is raising the alarm in his province about what he calls the unhindered flow of people, many of whom he says have not been properly vetted. It is not Congress, he says, but the White House that must find ways to promote legal immigration and quickly crack down on those who cross the border illegally.

The White House has indicated that President Biden is considering executive action to secure the border, rather than a bill from Congress. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has called the asylum system “broken” and called for federal aid for states and cities, has tried to blame Republican lawmakers and Trump for rejecting the border legislation.

“It used to be the case in the Obama administration, in the Trump administration, and under Bush and even Clinton, that migrants who crossed the border illegally would flee from Border Patrol agents. Now they’re running towards them,” Desmond said. “And they are processed and sold and are at the forefront. And anytime you have an entity that empowers people to lead the way, chaos ensues.”

Back in San Ysidro, a young woman named Olga, wearing a transparent poncho over a pink winter coat, clutched a cup of coffee as she explained that she had left Ecuador four weeks earlier to escape a different kind of chaos: rising gang violence. and economic hardship.

She left three children with relatives in Ecuador and hopes to reunite with her fourth child, who is in the US. The journey had shocked her. “There were good people, but there were also bad people,” she said through tears. – BBC