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Pima County's asylum seeker shelters are set to close Sunday

Asylum seekers wait their turn to cross into the U.S. from Nogales
Michel Marizco/KJZZ
Asylum seekers wait their turn to cross into the U.S. from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, and speak with a Customs and Border Protection interviewer in 2018.

Pima County officials say two facilities set up in Tucson to receive legally processed asylum seekers from the border will be shut down.

A collaboration between the city of Tucson and Pima County has provided transportation, temporary shelter and other services to asylum seekers released by the Border Patrol since 2019.

Pima County spokesman Mark Evans says the county has received about $117 million in federal funding from the Shelter and Services Program, or SSP.

“And all of those costs are currently reimbursed by the federal government, well, under SSP, we could not get reimbursed for those costs if there’s no one there,” he said.

That’s what happened on Monday, Evans says, when the shelters received no new daily arrivals. They’ve only been receiving about 70 per day for the last several months — since asylum restrictions put in place under the Biden administration first took hold. That's down from a recent, sharp uptick in Arizona border crossings in the winter of 2023, when Pima County was receiving upwards of 1,000 people a day at its Tucson shelters.

Evans says the county was spending about $138,000 per week at the end of last year on shelter operations, down from more than a million per week at the end of 2023.

Evans says without steady, daily arrivals, the county can’t guarantee the continuation of federal reimbursements. Executive actions signed by President Donald Trump also may cause federal aid funding to be withheld anyway, in order to audit local efforts. As a result of those two factors, Evans says both shelters are set to shutter operations on Sunday night at midnight.

In a memo to supervisors on Thursday, county administrator Jan Lesher said the effort had been one of the county’s most significant aid programs.

“Without the county’s leading role coordinating and obtaining the funding for the Temporary Shelter Program, more than a half-million people over the past six and a half years would have been left to fend for themselves on the streets of Tucson, Nogales, Douglas, and elsewhere in southern Arizona,” she wrote.

Pima County Board of Supervisors Chair Rex Scott says local leaders expected changes with the new Trump administration.

“As soon as he took office and issued the executive orders that he did, we knew we needed to move quickly,” he said.

Executive actions announced Monday included an end to the current CBP One asylum process at the border.

Alisa Reznick is a senior field correspondent covering stories across southern Arizona and the borderlands for the Tucson bureau of KJZZ's Fronteras Desk.