Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
A bus of asylum seekers who were sent from Arizona to Washington arrives at a church on Capitol Hill in Washington, August 11, 2022.
When Mayors Eric Adams of New York and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago looked up from their incoming migrant busing emergency reports, they probably did not expect to see a Democratic governor performing political stunts. The mayors had asked the governor not to send people to their overtaxed cities before he did just that. For his part, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis explained that the crippling December winter storms hindered the state’s ability to handle the asylum seekers who’d turned up in Colorado wanting to move on to New York or Chicago. (Many of the migrants had traveled on their own or with other assistance to Colorado from border areas, according to The Colorado Sun.)
After his 15 minutes of a national blame-shame game, Polis backed off.
Polis’s decision to latch onto Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida’s use of transportation schemes to relieve a migrant problem only made a bad situation worse in the targeted cities. Some emboldened governors prefer to play fast and loose with the lives of migrants, impervious to the facts on the ground in distant metro areas. Tens of thousands of people have now landed in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, and beyond. Some 40,000 people have ended up in Gotham alone.
Congress won’t deliver on broader immigration reform, held hostage as it is by Republicans dedicated to maximum-chaos, minimum-benefit stunts like trying to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, while President Biden tries to keep a lid on a long-simmering problem. And when Title 42 expulsions end, Biden’s balancing act may crumble.
It’s the mayors who have stepped up as the leading problem solvers on the front lines of a problem that Southern tier states have dumped on them, with nonprofit groups banding together to help them pick up the pieces. They’re struggling with a genuine conundrum: What should an effective response to migrant issues look like for the affected cities and towns?
Right now, short-term emergency measures are the only options that mayors can cobble together. The cities and towns that migrants arrive in are already straining to provide shelter and social services for homeless people in their communities. Local nonprofit social services, particularly ones already focused on immigration and homelessness, have quickly mobilized to assist local leaders. In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser facilitated this coordination by declaring a public emergency and established an office of migrant services to assist people with basic needs and future travel. Longtime mutual aid networks in the city also stepped in to coordinate the basics and provide support when people arrived in the middle of the night at the city’s train station or at Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence.
Leaving the federal Border Patrol to improvise catch-and-release policies in overtaxed places like El Paso (which have historically done a good job handling smaller border surges) is no answer either. With border detention and city shelter facilities now overwhelmed, the CPB has released people directly onto El Paso’s streets. During the holiday airline meltdown in the San Diego area, the border authorities began leaving people at bus stops and stations.
What should an effective response to migrant issues look like for the affected cities and towns?
At the end of December, the federal government finally stepped up with emergency funds to localities. FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program National Board allocated about $75 million for immediate humanitarian needs to more than three dozen social service organizations and state and local governments, including those of New York, Chicago, Washington, El Paso, Brownsville, McAllen, San Antonio, Riverside County, California, and Pima County, Arizona. Roughly $20 million went to Texas cities. New York requested $1 billion in assistance, but ended up with just $8 million.
In the 2023 omnibus spending plan enacted late last year, the EFSP got a major boost. Congress designated up to $785 million of the $800 million transfer from Customs and Border Protection to FEMA to include monies for the EFSP’s existing humanitarian efforts. Of those funds, $50 million is allocated for shelter construction and expansion. In 2021, Congress appropriated $510 million to the EFSP, with $110 million for humanitarian assistance to migrants.
Absent political stunts, better communication between states and cities and coordination of services would tamp down the chaos before migrants move on. Ideally, when border officials complete intake processes, people could link up with local nonprofit groups that provide short-term shelter and assist with travel to interior states. When gaps appear, state officials could step in and whisk migrants elsewhere.
A national coordination plan that designates a federal agency or a federally designated nonprofit with strong communications lines into specific cities and towns to handle arrivals’ needs once they are discharged would alleviate some of the chaos. “Having a federal strategy on what it means to support new arrivals at final destinations would be step one in my mind,” says Mo Kantner, the American Immigration Council’s director of state and local initiatives. “As soon as they are crossing and they are submitting their claims for entering the country, [we should be] intervening at that point potentially to figure out how to support them on their journeys.”
The federal government could possibly spin off some version of the current refugee resettlement program for asylum seekers. Though Jonathan Blazer, the ACLU’s director of border strategies, suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement might be able to scale up to migrant issues, he cautions that an agency still in recovery mode after Trump administration cuts and interference could have difficulties pivoting. “It’s not a perfect system,” he says, but it does offer a specific process to handle refugee arrivals along with “a federal stream of support to nonprofit organizations that provide assistance.”
For solutions to short-term emergencies, immigration advocates point to one San Diego organization as a leader in adapting its frameworks to handle the shifting demands of asylum seekers. The San Diego Rapid Response Network assists asylum seekers in the San Diego border area. Established in 2017 and rooted in the experiences of volunteers searching bus stations for people in need, it is now a migrant shelter-providing network of human rights and service organizations, attorneys, local community leaders, and volunteers. Naomi Steinberg, an immigration advocate, has called the network “the gold standard” and told The San Diego Union-Tribune, “They have really shown organizations around the country how it can be done and how it should be done.” The migrant shelter has provided basic needs to more than 100,000 people, as well as language, medical, and legal services, and an Emergency Immigration Enforcement Hotline to report arrests, checkpoints, harassment, and raids.
