EL PASO, Texas – With the influx of migrants likely to top 5,000 per day, El Paso city and county leaders plan to work with non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, to bus people to Dallas, Houston and other cities with major airport hubs, allowing migrants to be transported to points across the U.S.
In an exclusive interview with The Dallas Morning News, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said the city and county will prepare for the number of arrivals to double from a daily average of 2,400 after a pandemic-related public health order expires on Dec. 21, based on a federal judge’s ruling.
The order, known as Title 42, has allowed U.S. border agents to expel migrants more than 2 million times without giving them a chance to apply for asylum under the justification that it was for pandemic safety. The lifting of the health order is expected to lead to a rise in migrants seeking to turn themselves in to U.S. immigration authorities at the border, U.S. and Mexican authorities have said.
Nineteen Republican-controlled states, including Texas, filed an emergency legal request this week to try to delay the lifting of the pandemic-related restrictions.
The arrivals are already straining local resources, and the key is to coordinate with faith groups throughout the state and beyond, said Samaniego, who met with Alejandro N. Mayorkas during the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security’s visit to the border this week.
“We’re looking at anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 per day,” Samaniego confirmed. “But we’ve faced many challenges before. And we know how to do this. And we know we can’t do it alone. This time, we’re working with NGOs in nearby cities to help us with the challenge that awaits us.”
The plan includes transporting hundreds of migrants daily in buses to cities like Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Denver – all cities with major airport hubs that can facilitate the transportation. That means “we can move people faster and more efficiently” – especially during a period when airports are already teeming with holiday travelers, Samaniego said.
For the past few years, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas has already been receiving migrants bused from the border and from a detention center in Anson, Texas. The church partners with Dallas Responds, a nonprofit collective of faith and relief groups.
With the lifting of Title 42, Dallas Responds expects to receive five to six buses weekly from El Paso, said Almas Muscatwalla, a liaison with border and governmental agencies. The need will be constant for the next six months, she said.
In the past two weeks, Dallas Responds has received about 200 migrants. Each receive a meal, fresh clothing and assistance to make the next leg of their journey. The migrants or their families pay for plane and bus tickets.
“We love the idea of people coming and serving,” she said. “This is a very meaningful and important thing that we’re doing for the world to see that this is what America believes in... And this is what people of faith believe in.”
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins emphasized that all the migrants coming from El Paso have already been processed and released by federal immigration officials. Most will carry immigration papers that tell them to report to authorities with new addresses so they can make their legal defense at later dates.
“This is a faith-led NGO initiative” for migrants from El Paso County headed to their final destinations, Jenkins said. “There won’t be any taxpayer money spent, and it isn’t envisioned that the government will be involved in any way,” he said.
Logistics are not yet finalized, and Samaniego stressed that “El Paso does not want to overwhelm communities, and that’s why it’s so important to coordinate closely with NGOs in these cities with big hubs.”
The aim, he said, is to help clear space in El Paso, a city whose legacy of tolerance as the Ellis Island of the Southwest is being tested. On Thursday evening, the streets of El Paso and the airport’s lounge area were filled with migrants, many of them from Nicaragua.
El Paso leaders, including U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, announced that the city received a new $6 million commitment to underwrite its migrant response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The advance funding will be used to continue providing food and lodging for some migrants. The money is in addition to $2 million in advance funding already received.
Escobar called on the community to remain resilient. “While this is an overwhelming time, and more challenges definitely lie ahead, it’s important that we continue to focus on solutions and lead strategically, with the dignity and goodwill El Paso has always been known for,” she said.
In a news conference Thursday, Mayor Oscar Leeser said El Paso does not plan to declare an emergency disaster. He said the city is preparing by offering outside toilets, and water stations – and doing everything to keep people “off the streets” as temperatures fall below freezing.
“This funding and shelter is not the answer, it’s a Band-Aid to really a bigger problem,” said Leeser. “It’s something we’re going to have to work with the (United Nations) and other countries, to work through a situation ... that again is bigger than El Paso and that now has become bigger than the United States.”
Mario D’Agostino, a deputy city manager leading the emergency response, said the vast majority of migrants have no plans to stay in El Paso, so the challenge is to move asylum seekers out in an efficient manner.
“Our airport has a limited number of available flights on a daily basis,” D’Agostino said. “We have a couple of bus transportation companies. They also have limited seating. So when you start looking at these high numbers that Title 42 might bring us when it is taken away, that will add to these numbers.”
Earlier this week, in an interview with local journalists, including a KTEP public radio reporter, Mayorkas said the Biden administration was considering expanding a program that currently allows Ukrainians and Venezuelans to “prequalify” for asylum processing and enter the United States by plane from various points around the world.
Last October, the U.S. and Mexico agreed on a plan that allows Venezuelan migrants to enter the U.S. legally without having to set foot in Mexico. Under the plan, migrants were able to apply for humanitarian visas via online. A cap was set at 24,000. More than 6 million people have left Venezuela in the past five years.
The idea behind the plan was to ease pressure at the U.S.-Mexico border, Roberto Velasco, a top Mexican diplomat and chief officer for The North America Unit at the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, told The Dallas Morning News.
Velasco added that any new cooperation with the U.S. must include elements that include “an expansion of the new humanitarian parole program; efforts to continue the diplomatic dialogue with countries like Cuba and Venezuela … and fostering economic development in the migrants’ communities of origin.”
The goal, Velasco said, is to keep migrants away from smugglers who too often lead their prey through a dangerous and costly journey through Mexico. “You close a window, and you open a door” in a safe, orderly way, he said.
The number of Venezuelans entering Mexico has plummeted from a daily average of 4,000 to less than 200. The number of Venezuelans living in Mexico, he added, has dropped from 50,000 to less than 10,000.
Here on the border, migrant groups have shifted from Venezuelans to mostly Nicaraguans and other Central Americans, as well as Ecuadorans and Peruvians.
The Venezuelan program, Samaniego said, has been “highly successful, and we on the border can attest to that firsthand. Our hope is that the federal government can duplicate that with other countries.”
Annunciation House, a faith-based nonprofit in El Paso, has already sent charter buses of migrants to Denver; Omaha, Nebraska.; and Kansas City, Missouri; with St. Louis next on the list, said Ruben Garcia, the organization’s executive director. The trips have been supported by faith communities in each city.
He implored NGOs and faith groups to heed the call: “As I’ve said before to all faiths, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’ And I am saying now, you can actually live that out.”
Smaller communities “are stepping up to the plate, with 50 migrants here and there,” he said. “But when the numbers increase dramatically, where we have to send 1,000 here or there, we will need faith communities in Dallas, Phoenix and other big cities to help out.”
