About 150 people, most of them men, were milling around on the corner of the Iris Avenue transit center parking lot in southern San Diego last Wednesday.
It’s one of several locations in the southern California city where Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the US border agency, since mid-September has been releasing asylum seekers who have crossed the US-Mexico border.
By last Thursday, more than 14,000 people had been dropped off by federal authorities at similar locations around San Diego in just four weeks, according to the immigrant support group Al Otro Lado.
Their arrival has overwhelmed local respite shelters, where availability is limited due to funding cuts from the state. So non-profit organizations and legal aid groups jumped in to help migrants figure out their next steps.
Several non-profit organizations have set up at the Iris Avenue transit center to welcome the asylum seekers – people from west African countries, India, Turkey, Colombia, Venezuela, Russia, Uzbekistan, China and Vietnam.
There’s a booth with donated clothing, a hand-washing station and portable toilets lining the sidewalk. The line in front of the food tent expands and contracts, but the charging tables are consistently crowded by men hunched over their phones.
“The first thing the migrant looks for when he comes off the bus is where he’s going to eat,” said Radoun Elouhhab, a 34-year-old asylum seeker from Morocco, in Spanish. “The second is where he’s going to charge his phone and get wifi so he can talk to his family. Then, he’ll start looking for how to get to his destination.”
Elouhhab lived in Mexico for six years, where he drove for Uber and worked at a plastics factory. He left Mexico because it had become too dangerous, he said. He himself arrived at the transit center weeks ago and has stayed to help other migrants getting out of detention.
He’s been working with his friend Abdellouahab Ghiat, 38, who is originally from Algeria but also lived in Mexico, to provide translation for the Arabic speakers. “Lots of people from Mauritania, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia … they don’t know where they are. It’s necessary to explain to them that we can help them figure out their plans,” Ghiat said in Spanish.
Most migrants need just one or two days to get their bearings before they go to family members and friends across the country.
“It’s a very diverse population, and the majority of these people have resources,” said Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, which provides legal services to refugees, deportees and other migrants, about those who have newly arrived. “What I’m seeing is people who are middle class, upper middle class, have the resources to get here, have the resources for plane tickets and hotels, and are fleeing persecution in some cases, in other cases it’s economic migration. But by and large they are asking me like, how do I get a job? How do I get my work permit? And they are turning themselves into border patrol. This isn’t people who are trying to evade capture.”
Pinheiro and other organization leaders are highlighting the role of immigration authorities in creating the bottleneck at these transit centers. They say CBP is transferring migrants from Texas and Arizona to be processed in San Diego, and that border patrol has in recent months detained hundreds of migrants in the open air, exposed to the temperature variations of the desert and without sustained shelter or services, in a kind of no man’s land between the two walls that comprise the border with Mexico.
Legal migration routes to the US right now are “extremely limited”, Pinheiro explained. While US law in theory permits people to cross at a port of entry and apply for asylum, in practice applications are limited by the requirement migrants use the CBP One to apply and book an appointment. “You can probably count on two hands how many people speak Spanish, Haitian Creole or English, which are the three languages supported by the CBP One app,” Pinheiro said. “And unless you can make an appointment on the government app, you are turned away from the port of entry.” Migrants end up crossing the border elsewhere and being detained by border patrol at the detention sites at the border wall, she said.
People leave these sites when immigration authorities are ready to process their asylum claims. Some are released with a date to appear in court to continue their case; these are the migrants that are dropped off at the transit centers. Others are sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers. And for those with an urgent medical issue, they are taken to a hospital.
Families are struggling to stay together throughout the process, Pinheiro said. “We have documented over 250 families that have been separated,” adding that her organization had submitted inquiries with border patrol for information on 150 cases, and received responses for only 50. A third of those responses had no information as to the whereabouts of the person, just that they were released, Pinheiro said.
Border patrol did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Sometimes Pinheiro and her colleagues can locate a family member who was just dropped off at a different transit center. Other times families find out that their missing members have been sent to an Ice detention facility located, at times as far away as in Louisiana. Pinheiro said she had heard about children separated from their parents because they are 18 years old, and pregnant women separated from their spouses.
Reconnecting with people who were dropped off at the hospital for medical attention, Pinheiro said, is proving perhaps the most difficult. She suspects these migrants don’t get processed properly and are not in the system. When they are released, they often don’t have their belongings. “I was here at Iris one day and I watched four women come off of the trolley wrapped in hospital sheets with no paperwork, not even an ID … Thankfully our partners at JFS [Jewish Family Service] were able to contact CBP and get their paperwork because they had to travel to the east coast and they needed it to get on an airplane.”
Index cards with names and ages are strewn across a table at the Iris Avenue transit center as volunteers plug names into spreadsheets that keep track of missing people. An Afghan woman is handing a phone back and forth to a volunteer, crying as she speaks into Google Translate to try to communicate what she knows about a missing family member who might still be detained.
Many of the people coming off the bus need to make their way to the airport. At one table, volunteers check people in for their flights and print out boarding passes. Ruth Mendez, 30, a volunteer with the grassroots collective Detention Resistance, is moving among the asylum seekers getting information on who needs a night at a hotel or church or synagogue shelter before getting on a plane. Elouhhab and Ghiat spread the word among the Arabic speakers about the bus that’s taking folks to the airport. Mendez calls them her “compañeros”, or comrades. “They themselves tell other people who are waiting for their families – while they’re waiting for their families – ‘It’s going to be OK, we’re going to find your family.’ So it’s the solidarity we want to uplift … that we’re doing solidarity work, not charity.”
Paulina Reyes-Perrariz has been coordinating the response with organizations such as Al Otro Lado and Haitian Bridge Alliance. She is the managing attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which represents immigrants in deportation proceedings. She has been advocating with the county for more support, saying the burden placed on NGOs is unfair.
“The community is here showing up, the government should also,” said Reyes-Perrariz. “We want to continue welcoming asylum seekers but we want to do it in a safe manner that’s sustainable.”
Non-profit organizations say San Diego county in recent weeks has stepped up and added resources. On 10 October, county officials approved the use of $3m from the American Rescue Plan Act to provide services to the asylum seekers in the county. Still, the generators keeping the coffee hot, and the peanut-butter sandwiches being handed out, are all donated by the community, say organizers.
Pinheiro says the injection of funds, while helpful, is a short-term measure. “The investment in this is not as effective as an investment in a long-term solution,” like renewed state and federal funding for respite shelters. “I’m glad the county’s stepping up. But we wouldn’t need to do any of this if they actually invested in a longer-term solution here.”
