EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – El Paso city officials are tracking migrant caravans making their way to the border from southern Mexico and stand ready to deploy resources if they come here.
“We are monitoring the situation so we can prepare for any potential contingencies,” said Enrique Dueñas, spokesman for the El Paso Fire Department and the Office of Emergency Management. “We don’t know what part of the border they’re going. They might as well go to El Paso or they can end up in McAllen, Texas.”
Several Mexican news media outlets have been following caravans that left Chiapas state near the border with Guatemala earlier this month and report that more groups are getting ready to depart in the next few days.
Activists like Luis Garcia Villagran of the Center for Human Dignity in Chiapas say thousands of migrants around the city of Tapachula have run out of resources, can’t get jobs and fear that asylum in the U.S. might be curtailed if Donald Trump wins the presidency next month.
The activist also said many have given up on waiting for online appointments in the U.S. through the CBP One app.
The vanguard of a caravan that left Chiapas on Oct. 5 was in the outskirts of Mexico City on Thursday while others advanced along the neighboring state of Oaxaca. Some media reported Friday that Mexican authorities detained 118 caravan members and returned them to Chiapas.
Dueñas said El Paso officials are in contact for updates from Mexican authorities, with whom they developed a working relationship during past migrant surges in El Paso.
The city of El Paso has previously deployed municipal employees to assist at shelters, placed migrant families in hotels and assisted with busing migrants released from U.S. Custody and Border Protection custody. By and large, those migrants don’t stay in El Paso, Dueñas said. The federal government has reimbursed local governments for migrant expenses.
The city operated a welcoming center to assist released migrants with sponsors in the U.S. or their own monetary resources; it also bused migrants to New York and Chicago in coordination with authorities there.
Those programs and a shelter at the former Morehead Middle School have been on standby since the arrival of asylum-seekers to El Paso plummeted several months ago.
“Morehead is now the community readiness center, so it’s ready for any kind of emergency, not just migrants, that may happen in El Paso,” Dueñas said. “That space is now ours. If an emergency were to happen, it’s pretty much turn on the light switch and we’re ready to go.”
He said the OEM is not ruling out a spike in migrant arrivals in the coming months because migration tends to increase at year’s end, anyway.
The wild card on a sudden spike of asylum-seekers without appointments at ports of entry is that the city only takes migrants lawfully released by CBP. Those releases have substantially decreased since a June 4 executive order restricted asylum petitions from unlawful border crossers.
Migrants should “make sure they get their information from official sources,” Dueñas said. “Every time we’ve had groups at the Juarez border, a lot of them are misinformed. They will have information that a Facebook post said, ‘(Go at) 3 a.m. at whatever gate of the border wall is going to be open for everyone.’ They show up and, of course, that is not true.”
Federal officials in El Paso also are monitoring the caravans but did not say if they expect any of those migrants to come this way.
CBP has been averaging 430 daily migrant encounters in the past four weeks, or 13,000 a month, according to the City of El Paso’s online Migrant Dashboard, which gathers information from federal agencies locally. On Friday, the city reported 440 CBP migrant encounters and 220 releases.
In Juarez, the community kitchen at Our Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral had a few migrants at lunch this week. Operators said the dining room is full whenever the migrant population spikes in the city.
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