SAN BENITO, Texas — When seven newly arrived migrants were recently released from government custody with nowhere to stay overnight, an emergency shelter in this small border town answered the call and dispatched a volunteer to make its fifth such pickup of the day from nearby Brownsville.
The shelter, La Posada Providencia, had hot food ready and ramen noodles for later when the migrants were still hungry. Some of the men, who had come from Cuba and Nicaragua, quickly collapsed on beds with clean sheets and pillows. The volunteer would take them to the airport early the next morning and then continue their journey north.
As the United States experiences its largest wave of migration on the Southwestern border in decades, it increasingly relies on an informal pipeline of shelters and other stopovers to allow migrants to stay on a temporary basis, many of whom seek asylum and help them arrange travel. from border communities to where they intend to wait — a wait that could potentially take years — on their immigration court proceedings.
From the time President Biden took office last year until April, according to an analysis of federal data, the government has admitted about a quarter of the undocumented migrants apprehended at the southwestern border, or about 700,000 of the 2.7 million. The rest were quickly expelled from the country under a public health emergency order related to the pandemic, or returned under another legal authority. On Friday, a federal judge ordered that the rule, which was to be lifted Monday, must remain in effect; the administration said it would appeal.
But though many of the thousands of migrants crossing every day are let in – of the record 234,088 migrants who arrived in April, nearly half were released from the country for a variety of reasons, including humanitarian exceptions to public health orders and insufficient detention space. In some cases, the government cannot expel people – Cubans and Venezuelans, for example – because it has no diplomatic relations with the country of origin.
Since the Biden administration sees about 8,200 border crossings a day — or nearly the population of College Station, Texas, entering the country every two weeks, far more than this time last year — it’s counting on small nonprofits like La Posada Providencia. to control the influx into border towns and villages and prevent politically explosive images of chaos and disorder ahead of the November midterms.
However, some shelters are becoming overloaded. At El Paso, so many migrants are crossing the border that a shelter there is working with the city to quickly recruit more staff and create space. A shelter in Eagle Pass is also reaching capacity and looking for ways to get migrants out of town faster.
“You will see that a lot of people have to be released on the street,” Ruben Garcia, the director of the shelter in El Paso, warned during a press conference last week.
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Whether providing a meal, a place to cool off or sleep, legal counseling, medical care, transportation or help figuring out how to get to a destination, these shelters and centers, sometimes in collaboration with state and local officials, filling a void in the outdated immigration system.
Border police and immigration and customs enforcement have informally relied on such places for years. But the Biden administration, under intense pressure to show it was prepared for the end of the public health order, recently made them a central part of its response plan. The government also included modest funding for the organizations — $150 million in grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — in its annual budget request, a first.
Yet it is a far cry from the government’s formal relationship with nine resettlement agencies that it has contracted to provide a range of services to refugees, such as those who came from Afghanistan last year and those now from Ukraine.
For years, the undocumented migrants crossing the southwestern border were largely single Mexican men. That started to change in 2011, and changed even more in 2014, when people from other Central American countries, including entire families, fled the rampant violence.
At the time, the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas, took in hundreds of migrant families crossing the southern tip of the state. There, the migrants would receive medical care, shelter and supplies to help them get through the hours of travel ahead on their way to their destination.
Before entering the church, migrants were simply dropped off at the local bus station after being released by border police officers.
But as more families crossed over, the church became overwhelmed. Volunteers appealed to Sister Norma Pimentel, the executive director of the Division of Catholic Charities in the Rio Grande Valley. Since then, Sister Pimentel has overseen a temporary shelter and relief center that can accommodate 1,200 people in downtown McAllen, just across the street from the bus station.
As Sister Pimentel’s operation has expanded over the past eight years, other shelters and intermediate stations have opened along the border, offering similar models of relief. In the past year, migrants from around the world have arrived at the southwestern border, many fleeing poverty and violence and hoping to seek asylum. Recently, there has been an increase in Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians passing through the shelters.
“The most important thing is to restore dignity – that was the focus,” said Sister Pimentel. “And stay away from politics.”
Typically, the migrants passing through the centers already have contacts in the United States and plan to reunite with them, often within hours of being released from government custody. In many of the centers, workers and volunteers will call relatives or friends of migrants to confirm their plans and help them buy a bus or plane ticket, usually paid for by the migrants or their contacts.
Many migrants take buses from border towns to cities with major airports and then fly to their destination, usually Houston, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington or Los Angeles.
Recently, however, more and more migrants appear without plan or contact. Shelters can quickly become overwhelmed in such circumstances.
Sister Pimentel serves only women and families with children at the McAllen Center. She coordinates with other groups in the area who can take in migrants who are not traveling as a family.
One such place is La Posada Providencia, which sits amid farmland about 40 minutes from McAllen.
Maryory Hernandez, of Guatemala, spent a night there in early May and arrived at the shelter the day after her 18th birthday, planning to leave the next day to reunite with relatives in Florida. Ms. Hernandez said she left Guatemala on April 8 because she was threatened by gangs. “I was scared,” she said of her journey alone. She finally felt “some peace,” she added when she arrived at La Posada Providencia.
Volunteers across the country are eager to help newcomers. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was supposed to lift the emergency public health ordinance in late spring, Shon Young, the associate pastor of a church in the small border town of Del Rio, Texas, started getting calls from people in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Illinois, asked him how they could help.
In 2019, two senior officials from the Del Rio Border Patrol sector reached out to Mr. Young and other local church leaders to see if they could create a shelter similar to those in other border towns where many migrants have crossed over.
As a result, the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Center was established. In 2021 it helped 22,317 migrants. A record was set for the center in March, with 5,028 migrants passing through.
In April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, began transporting migrants to Washington. He said he wanted to show President Biden what it was like to release them by the hundreds into a community. Many of those buses have departed from the center of Val Verde. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, also a Republican, recently joined Mr. Abbott in sending busloads of migrants to Washington.
At a shelter in Yuma, Arizona, Amanda Aguirre, president and chief executive of the Regional Center for Border Health, said she is in regular contact with the airport in Phoenix, which has complained about migrants arriving without plane tickets. When a bus leaves Yuma, she said, she lets the airport authority know when it will arrive, how many migrants they speak and what languages they speak.
“It’s more coordination than anyone can imagine. That happens every day,” she said.
Communication between the various shelters has increased in the past year as the number of border crossings has increased, said Marielle Septién, who coordinates a border shelter network for Church World Service, a nonprofit resettlement organization.
Now, however, there is a growing need to also coordinate with cities across the country that migrants travel through and to.
Officials in Portland, Maine, where many African migrants have arrived, recently announced that the city can no longer guarantee residence for migrants. The city sounded the alarm in October when it helped migrant families of nearly 480 people. Earlier this month, that number had risen to 1,200.
“Compassionate care for these individuals does not stop at the southern border,” said Kristen Dow, director of health and human services in Portland. “Compassionate concern is to direct these individuals and families to their destination cities and to ensure that those destination cities have the services and access to the services they need.”
In Washington, volunteers rush to meet the busloads of migrants sent from Arizona and Texas. But last week, a volunteer said there were no more shelters available and there was little money left to help with transportation. The city has not provided assistance and an application for federal funds has yet to be approved. Without such resources, the migrants could become homeless.
The release of hundreds of thousands of migrants in the country over the past year is not the result of a clearly defined immigration policy, but in many cases is a result of the government’s inability to expel them for various reasons. And unless outdated immigration laws are changed, the pattern will continue, many said, adding that as it stands, shelters and shelters need much more support than the FEMA grants provide.
“It’s a temporary solution. It shouldn’t be how we support organizations that do this,” said Marisa Limón Garza, the senior director for advocacy and programming at the Hope Border Institute, a human rights organization in El Paso. “It’s untenable.”
