Officials in Tucson are bracing for street releases of migrants in their community as federal funding dries up at the end of March. It comes after an unprecedented effort to stave this off. Advocates have been working hard to shelter newly arrived migrants in Tucson, but now, Pima County’s migrant aid effort is facing a funding cliff and county officials are sounding the alarm.
Emily Bregel is covering the story for the Arizona Daily Star, and she joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: So county officials there are basically saying that we could soon be seeing Border Patrol agents releasing hundreds of migrants onto the street in Tucson every single day, right? I mean, how many?
BREGEL: They’re saying it could be up to about 400 people a day. Of course, that depends on how many migrants are arriving in the area, but at current levels, it could be about that many.
GILGER: Wow. OK. So tell us more about how this program, how this system works up until now, like how this migrant aid effort has been functioning in southern Arizona for quite some time now?
BREGEL: It's really been a quite impressive and complex coordination between numbers of different groups, including Border Patrol, our local shelters, through religious organizations, and then since 2019 the County and to some extent the city, have been involved in coordinating this, administering federal funding that started to come down in 2019 to support these efforts to provide really some basic shelter and respite for migrants arriving in the area. The alternative would be migrants, including families, elderly people being released onto the streets with really no resources, some not even knowing where they are, having illnesses. And what we've seen up till now is about, or recently, about 1000 migrants per day in this region are being released. That's including 500 in the Tucson area, and 500 who are actually coming from Santa Cruz and Cochise County, and as part of this coordinated effort, state funded busses have been helping to transport those migrants in the smaller border communities that would really struggle to shelter them themselves. They've been coming up to Tucson as well. So this is going to impact not only Tucson, but Cochise and Santa Cruz counties as well, who will no longer have that assistance, and so they are going to be overwhelmed, with probably about 500 per day in between those two counties being released.
GILGER: Wow. So as you kind of outlined there, like migrants who come in these situations don't typically stay in border communities like Tucson for long, right? Like they're usually, often on their way if they get this kind of help?
BREGEL: Exactly, yes. Normally, within a day or two, these families or individuals are going on to families or sponsors within the interior of the country, so there they'll have some place to be, someone to help them kind of get oriented, something as simple as having a place to charge your cell phone. Which which some of these families do have also, I should point out that 98% of families get have their own funding, maybe through their their sponsors, to travel, to get their bus ticket or plane ticket to their to their families, but it's having that help, getting access to a computer, figuring out how to buy the plane tickets that they won't have going forward. And I should point out this is slated to start in April as the funding, the federal funding they're relying on, will run out at the end of March.
GILGER: End of March. Okay, so talk a little bit more about the federal funding and the situation there. Why is this happening? Now, have lawmakers tried to extend this funding to solve this?
BREGEL: This funding would have been extended as part of that recent border security package that was co-sponsored by Kyrsten Sinema, but failed. I think that was a couple weeks ago. Within hours of that legislation coming out, we had GOP legislators saying it's dead on arrival. It's going nowhere. And while some felt that legislation was problematic, it would have provided about, I think it was 1.4 billion in funding, not just for our area, but throughout the country, to support these migrant aid efforts and just help things run more smoothly. And really, many would say this, this money is necessary to prevent a humanitarian crisis on a daily basis, especially in some of these border communities that just can't handle those numbers on their own.
GILGER: So Pima County officials now are worried about this. They're looking at ways to mitigate the fallout, working with groups like Catholic Community Services. What are the potential sort of solutions here?
BREGEL: So we're going to see, going forward, what county officials think about devoting any level of local funding to this effort. The county administrator, Jan Lesher, said ‘this is a federal issue, and it should be federal funds that are helping communities deal with it’. That said, county staff has proposed a couple possibilities that will be under discussion with the county board of supervisors. And these contingency plans range from a really bare bones effort, maybe just providing a big. Tent, some signage and security there to something more robust that actually has people on staff there, food service that on that higher end could cost maybe a million a month. That's much less than we're spending in the federal funding, which is about a million per week on this effort, but still a million a month in county funds is significant. Jan Lesher, our county administrator, actually recommends against putting any local money towards this effort.
GILGER: So will this impact this kind of funding Cliff impact similar efforts in other communities like there's a center kind of like this in Phoenix, there are places like this in other border communities along the border, are we looking at a problem that could be much broader than what's happening in Tucson.
BREGEL: Yes and I haven't done the reporting in Phoenix, but I imagine something similar is underway because there's a similar kind of coordination with I think it might be IRC in Phoenix who also receives migrants released by Border Patrol. So I imagine this conversation is happening in many places in the borderlands. And one thing I should mention is that the migrants who are released by border troll patrol, they have been screened and cleared for release. They're given a court date, so technically they have documentation. They are no longer undocumented, but once Border Patrol releases them, they are in the country legally. They've had their belongings searched, fingerprints. They've gone through a screening process. So I think that's important to point out, because there's definitely concern from some about security, but this is Border Patrol making the decision that these people are OK to be released into the community.
GILGER: Yeah worth putting out. All right, we'll leave it there for now. Emily Bregel, covering this story for the Arizona Daily Star joining us from Tucson. Emily, thank you for coming back on. Thanks for your reporting here. I appreciate it.
BREGEL: Thanks for having me.
