In El Paso, Texas, a question: Where did the migrants go?
The crowds of migrants overflowing outside Sacred Heart Church had drastically diminished Wednesday morning after the U.S. Border Patrol a day earlier asked them nicely to turn themselves in to get processed.
The El Paso Office of Emergency Management reported that as of 7 a.m. there were only about 100 migrants around the church and 35 around the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in South El Paso.
On Monday, there had been up to 2,500 migrants sleeping in alleys, sidewalks and even on the street around the church with another 800 near the Opportunity Center, according to the El Paso Office of Emergency Management.
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On Tuesday, the Border Patrol passed out flyers telling undocumented migrants to turn themselves in at a processing site next to the nearby Paso Del Norte international bridge, where they were processed and then generally released.
The turnout was a trickle at first but soon hundreds of migrants lined up, hoping for a chance at a legal pathway to remain and continue to their destinations in the United States.
“The plan in the beginning was to have the officers process people right here on the spot. But there were so many people, they sent buses and they started taking everybody to the Central Process Center,” said Ruben Garcia, executive director of Annunciation House, which oversees a nonprofit network of faith-based migrant shelters.
“They were going to be processed there and after they were processed, they were going to be released. We are monitoring to ensure the people Border Patrol took, that Border Patrol lives up to their promise to release them,” Garcia said.
It remains to be seen if the crowds will return once the processed migrants are released from custody. The city is working to set up two shelters at vacant schools and possibly in the downtown convention center.
After the U.S. Customs and Border Protection operation, the El Paso Catholic Diocese had not seen massive numbers of new migrants at its shelters on Wednesday morning, a diocese spokesman said.
The county’s Migrant Services Support Center on Wednesday was at its 450 capacity with migrants released from Border Patrol custody, county government spokeswoman Laura Gallegos said. The center is looking to expand capacity with the addition of staff.
The center is a former warehouse where asylum-seekers are provided a brief orientation and help them with self-paid travel arrangements out of El Paso.
Along the Mexican border, there are still hundreds of asylum-seekers huddled on a sliver of U.S. land between the Rio Grande and the border fence in El Paso’s Lower Valley waiting to be processed by the Border Patrol with the pending end of the Title 42 pandemic-era restrictions that returned them to Mexico. CBP warns that enforcement of Title 8 immigration law will continue after Title 42 ends.
ICE deportation flights take off from El Paso
In a display of force, U. S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations deportation flights bound for Honduras and Guatemala took off from El Paso on Wednesday morning.
The flights transported shackled men and women to their home countries after they were recently taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol, ICE officials said. There were 116 people sent to Honduras and up to 135 returned to Guatemala.
In Texas, similar ICE repatriation flights usually depart from San Antonio and Harlingen in the Rio Grande Valley. Other flights depart from Virginia, Miami and the Phoenix-area.
Photojournalist Gaby Velasquez contributed to this report.