EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The City of El Paso has voted unanimously to keep an emergency ordinance active for another month to deal with the ongoing migrant humanitarian crisis.
The ordinance allows the city manager to deploy municipal personnel to venues including nonprofits assisting thousands of migrants released from U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody every week.
Migrant encounters in the El Paso-Southern New Mexico corridor again spiked in mid-December to 1,100 per day and the population at area processing centers swelled above 4,500 on consecutive days, according to the city’s online migrant dashboard.
Encounters have come down along the border in the past few days, as Mexican authorities crack down on migrants riding trains to the border. Nonetheless, CBP’s use of Title 8 authority to process the migrants means hundreds who surrendered last month are barely being released.
Mayor Oscar Leeser and city staff said the emergency municipal shelter at the former Morehead Middle School has hosted more than 3,000 released migrants since Dec. 22.
“Last night we had 396 overnight stays,” Leeser said at Wednesday’s city council meeting. “On Monday, we had 464 stays. On Sunday, we had 485 overnight stays, 579 on Saturday. We are using it.”
The mayor said the facility occasionally does not hold any migrants, and that some are routed to hotels based on demographics, such as being family units. But he said using the facility is more cost-effective than sending everyone to hotels and will continue to be used.
The school “was bought for emergency sheltering. We don’t plan to sell it,” he said, responding to a citizen’s concerns the city would eventually sell a building purchased with federal funds to a private developer. “We bought it to use it and we’re using it as needed.”
Even if the migrant emergency were to subside, half the property would continue to be available as a general-purpose emergency shelter while the other half operates as an animal services facility, he said.
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