() — Amid an increase in encounters with migrants on the southern border, the city of El Paso, Texas, launched this Saturday a migrant dashboard to follow the activity in your reception center.
The city has served more than 14,900 migrants since the beginning of September and has transported thousands of them to cities further north.
More than 8,000 migrants have been transported from El Paso to New York and about 2,300 to Chicago since Aug. 23, when the busing program began, according to the dashboard. Migrants are offered the city-funded trips after being processed and released by Border Patrol.
The “Migrant Situational Awareness Dashboard” also shows weekly U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounters and releases, as well as city resources used in the effort.
“This tool provides transparency to our community about the current humanitarian crisis and how it is being managed on a daily basis,” Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino said in a press release. “From day one, we have been open about how we are respectfully serving migrants passing through our community and our important emergency efforts to address the current humanitarian crisis.”
The migrant buses sent by El Paso add to the thousands of migrants the state of Texas has bused to New York, Washington and Chicago since August.
As more migrants arrive in New York, Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency on Friday to help respond to New York City’s migrant crisis, which he says will cost the city $1 billion this year. fiscal year. “We now have a situation where more people are arriving in New York City than we can immediately accommodate, including families with infants and young children,” Adams said.
According to the mayor, New York City now has more than 61,000 people in its shelter system, including thousands of homeless people and thousands of asylum seekers who have been bused in recent months from other parts of the country.
D’Agostino previously told that the unprecedented increase in migration has strained El Paso’s infrastructure.
Each day, border agents encounter an average of 1,500 migrants in the El Paso region, according to the city website.
The surge created a housing problem, with some migrants being sent to hotels, according to D’Agostino.
El Paso opened its migrant rest center last month after shelters reached capacity and people began pitching tents on the street.
A short drive away, the El Paso Border Patrol sector also recently erected a triage-style open-air processing center under a freeway overpass to help process migrants more quickly. The center includes intake sections, medical care and a waiting area, as well as buses equipped with processing technology parked on site.
About 70% of migrants arriving in El Paso come from Venezuela and head to El Paso because it is “currently the safest place to cross the Rio Grande into the United States,” according to the El Paso city website.
After making the perilous journey, newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers enter a very complicated and overwhelmed immigration system. This fiscal year alone, US immigration courts filed more than 819,000 new immigration cases.
The US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnussaid the latest wave of migration is driven primarily by people fleeing the “decaying communist regimes” of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, who are generally not subject to Title 42, the pandemic public health order that allows authorities quickly expel some migrants to Mexico or their countries of origin.
