Border Patrol drops immigrants off at bus stops

San Diego, San Diego.– Hundreds of migrants were dropped off at a San Diego bus stop this Friday instead of a reception center serving as a base of operations because local funding ran out prematurely, showing how the largest city in the United States States’ southern border is struggling to cope with an unprecedented influx of people.

Migrants, who previously had a safe place to charge their phones, go to the bathroom, eat and plan their trip to the United States, were now left on the street, with migrant support groups rushing to help. Can do with temporary measures.

Border Patrol buses carrying people from Senegal, China, Ecuador, Guatemala and many other countries pulled up outside a transit station. Migrant support groups informed them that from there they would be taken by bus to a parking lot, where they could charge their phones and ride to the airport. Most people planned to spend only a few hours in San Diego before catching a flight or having someone pick them up.

“Are we in San Diego?” asked Gabriel Guzman, a 30-year-old painter from the Dominican Republic who was freed Thursday after crossing the border from a remote mountainous area. She was ordered to appear in immigration court in Boston in June, where she hopes to earn money to send her three children.

From Mauritania, Abd Boudeh traveled through Nicaragua to Tijuana, Mexico, and followed other migrants a short distance to the border wall, where he surrendered to agents on Thursday after walking for about eight hours. The former molecular engineering student said he was fleeing persecution for being gay and plans to settle in Chicago with a cousin who has lived in the United States for 20 years.

“I’ve dreamed a lot about this (moment), and thank God I’m here,” Boudeh, 23, said in flawless English.

Volunteers gave instructions in English, Spanish and French to small groups, all single men and women. They used translation apps for other languages.

“Let’s cross the street together and sit in line,” a volunteer said into her phone, translating it into Hindi for a group of Indian men.

“Tired of the road,” 31-year-old Kazakh Alikan Rudier said in Russian as he waited for instructions to give to a friend in Los Angeles who was going to pick him up. The Border Patrol gave him a notice to appear in immigration court in August 2025 in Philadelphia, a city he had not heard from.

The parking lot at the transit center was full of cars, so the evacuees had nowhere to go, and there were no public bathrooms. A taxi driver offered a ride to San Diego International Airport for $100, double what ride-sharing apps charge. Some evacuees scattered through the neighborhood when volunteers failed to contact them with instructions to wait on the sidewalk.

San Diego County has allocated $6 million since October to SBCS, a nonprofit formerly known as South Bay Community Services, to provide phone charging stations, food, travel counseling and other services at the former elementary school. The group wanted to keep it open until March, but Thursday was its last day.

San Diego — along with New York City, Chicago and Denver — is one of many local governments that have struggled to help immigrants without sacrificing key services. As in other border cities, migrants typically stay for less than a day before moving to San Diego, but large shelters run by Jewish Family Service and Catholic Charities are full for months and prioritize families.

San Diego County Board of Supervisors President Nora Vargas strongly supported the evacuee shelter, but said the county had to hold back on spending while assessing damage from January’s devastating floods and addressing homelessness and health care shortages. its inhabitants. “We have to be fiscally prudent,” he said.

SBCS, which has come under heavy criticism from some immigrant advocacy groups, told the county its services cost $1.4 million a month, spokeswoman Margie Newman Tse said. The county asked to aim to reduce it to $1 million.

“It’s not that the funding ran out early, it’s that the funding was stretched to the limit,” Newman Tse said.

Aid groups have provided crucial support to newcomers, and have drawn criticism from some quarters. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week threatened to sue and close Annunciation House, a decades-old institution that shelters immigrants in El Paso. Paxton said the group “may facilitate illegal entry into the United States.”

Ruben Garcia, director of the advertising house, gathered supporters at a press conference to denounce Paxton’s strategy. “It’s a stark warning to other organizations that also do hospitality work that they may very well be ahead,” he said.

SBCS said it has served 81,000 immigrants in San Diego since Oct. 11. In a report submitted to the county, it said it had spent $750,000 on staff and $152,000 on operating costs, including lodging, transportation and security, as of Dec. 24.

“I could have done a lot more with $6 million,” said Erika Pinheiro, executive director of El Otro Lado, a migrant aid group that provides assistance to migrants when they are left on the streets.

Vargas, who last week wrote to President Joe Biden to ask for his support, defended the work of SBCS and highlighted its previous work with migrant children traveling alone at the San Diego Convention Center in 2019.

“Nobody’s perfect, especially when you’re trying to fill a void left by the federal government,” Vargas said, echoing a common sentiment among big-city mayors.

From October to January, the Border Patrol released more than 500,000 migrants with orders to appear in immigration court. Migrant aid groups are often successful in providing temporary shelter, but freedom on the streets is unheard of. San Diego transit stations have also been the scene of large-scale releases in the past year.

San Diego has become the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, averaging 800 arrests per day in January. Many come from West Africa and Asia. In the same month there was a daily average of more than 100 people from China.

The Border Patrol told migrant aid groups that 350 would be released on the streets this Friday, said Pedro Rios, director of the US-Mexico border program at the American Friends Service Committee, an advocacy group. The Border Patrol has no comment at this time.