It turned out that Border Patrol agents only brought the paperwork after they were contacted by Tony Martinez, then the mayor of Brownsville. Martinez told me that he suspected the agency was purposely creating an unmanageable situation to turn the Trump administration’s rhetoric about a crisis at the border into a reality. “There seems to have been an assumption that we couldn’t handle it, an expectation that we’re unable to manage” the mass release of asylum-seekers, Martinez said. “But I’m a problem solver, and if you give me a problem, I’ll give you your pick of solutions.”
Ronald Vitiello, former acting chief of the Border Patrol under President Obama and acting director for ICE until he was ousted by Trump in April, claims that post-release planning was simply not his job. Neither “CBP nor ICE are appropriated [by Congress] for this after care, we [did] it because it’s a best practice and because it makes sense and helps communities and our relationships with these towns, but nobody in the government is funded for that,” he said in a phone conversation. “These mayors and the cities, they came to expect a service brought to them by the government, they got used to it, [and] when the numbers overwhelmed everybody, they looked to us to fix it.”
A preview of the federal government’s new position toward released asylum-seekers came last October, when officials with the Department of Homeland Security informed humanitarian groups in San Diego that agents would no longer help with post-release planning. The policy was clarified on March 27, when then-CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said that CBP and ICE would begin releasing asylum-seekers en masse into border towns. In front of the bollard border fence and near the Paso del Norte International Bridge in El Paso, where migrants were being held behind razor wire, McAleenan, now the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, painted a grave picture of CBP facilities bursting with human beings, a situation he called unprecedented. The mass releases were being done with reluctance, he said.
“It represents an increase in flows that will follow,” McAleenan said. “That is not something we want to do, it is something we have to do given the overcrowding in our facilities.”
By that point, mass drop-offs of migrant families had already been occurring for a few weeks in El Paso, as well as sporadically in late 2018. On March 15, the city’s fire chief, Mario D’Agostino, emailed ICE official Marc Moore pleading with the agency not to release additional migrants into the city because shelters were at capacity. That request was ignored, and 147 people were dropped off at El Paso’s downtown bus station four days later—prompting the local office of emergency personnel to dispatch employees who then assisted migrants with purchasing tickets. The city regularly uses its own resources in such situations, deploying their own EMT staffs, for example, to screen migrants who have often been held in crammed and fetid conditions, with critically deficient access to hygiene products, sleeping space, and nutrition, leaving many in precarious health after an often harrowing journey.
A total of 35,000 of these asylum-seekers passed through a network of hospitality centers in El Paso, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque between December and March, according to D’Agostino. The direct releases were so overwhelming that Rep. Escobar, the congresswoman from El Paso, in a March 1 letter begged McAleenan “to alleviate some of the local burden that falls on my community.”
Though agents are supposed to detain migrants for no more than 72 hours, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general observed that 3,400 of 8,000 detainees at several different Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley during early June had been held for longer, with many stays longer than 10 days. In April, a government inspector visited a station in Clint, Texas, near El Paso, and found hungry children and adults living in lice-infested cells for weeks on end, sometimes being taken to a quarantine cell if they contracted scabies, chickenpox, or other diseases.

Aaron Cantú
Volunteers with Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley facilitate the arrival of asylum-seekers to a respite center in McAllen, Texas, on March 23, 2019.
The fact that Border Patrol has exerted wide discretion over who it detains, and for how long, made some immigration attorneys wonder whether agency leaders were timing the release of migrants for maximum impact. Back in the Rio Grande Valley, for example, The Monitor reported that asylum-seekers were being held in Border Patrol custody for as long as ten days—even as the agency publicly claimed facilities were at “critical capacity” and unable to handle the increased numbers of new arrivals. The prolonged detentions didn’t make any sense, argued attorney Karla Vargas of the Texas Civil Rights Project, for an agency trying to clear bed space as quickly as possible. She sees this as a sign that the agency may have chosen to do mass public releases for cynical reasons.
“Why are these empty, if we have this chaos happening at the [CBP] processing centers?” Vargas said. “I think it’s part of the narrative that the administration is trying to put forth that CBP is being overrun by immigrants, and therefore they need more money, when in reality it’s the way they’re mismanaging people and focused on stockpiling people in these processing centers instead of getting them to the next phase of the immigration process.”
Garcia, the director of Annunciation House in El Paso, also suspected a “political dimension” to the timing of the chaotic mass releases. “I think it goes beyond negligence, I really do,” Garcia said, “Especially when you start talking about the treatment of human beings.”
The first locality to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to end its Safe Release policy was San Diego County, which voted in April to sue the current and former heads of ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol for what it called a “sudden and unlawful change in policy.” The complaint alleged that the policy shift meant that border agents were now releasing asylum seekers from federal detention without “the previously-provided assistance in reaching their final destination(s) outside the County.” The suit seeks a reinstatement of that assistance and reimbursement for the resources San Diego has devoted to caring for asylum-seekers.
That assistance, the San Diego lawsuit said, had long included helping asylum seekers locate contact information for relatives residing in the U.S. and facilitating phone calls between asylum seekers and those relatives. ICE would then transport people to points of departure, such as bus stations, train stations, and airports, and even offer food for the journey. It remains unclear, according to the complaint, why this policy was ended; it came to an abrupt halt, without explanation, last year.
The San Diego suit caught the attention of officials in New Mexico and West Texas. Albuquerque eventually filed a joint lawsuit with the state of New Mexico, citing duress similar to that claimed by San Diego County—and the newer suit goes into far more detail about the state resources deployed to pick up the federal government’s slack. It alleges that the New Mexico office of the attorney general, as well as the state’s youth and family services department and office of emergency management, spent resources investigating reports of human trafficking, while workers for the state labor and transportation departments were directed to coordinate travel plans for asylum seekers. In addition, according to the complaint, state police were on alert in communities receiving large numbers of people, and the state sent $750,000 in emergency grants to the cities of Deming and Las Cruces and Luna County to manage migrants rapidly being released from federal custody.
There were other public safety consequences, well beyond the scope of the lawsuits. With the number of families crossing the border on the rise in April, a far-right militia group made national headlines after its gun-toting members filmed themselves briefly detaining hundreds of migrants along the border, a few dozen miles south of Las Cruces. On April 15, just three days after Border Patrol began dropping off asylum-seekers there, one extremist called the city threatening to take action “if necessary.” A few months later, somebody called in a death threat to the mayor’s office, requiring the police department to assign several cops to trail the mayor at a city council meeting.
In an interview, Mayor Ken Miyagishima blamed the president’s rhetoric for the elevated threats. “They hear the top elected official in the U.S. making [anti-immigrant] comments, and it just lends itself to the animosity among friends, neighbors, relatives,” Miyagishima said.
Las Cruces accommodated 16,750 refugees since April, according to its own count, and still received about 150 daily until recently. After rushing to supply transportation between local hospitality centers, bus stations, and airports, the city agreed to put up $500,000 toward city worker overtime pay, partial reimbursement for local non-profits providing refugee hospitality services, and rent for an old armory near downtown that now acts as an unofficial central processing center. The money came from a special fund the city generates by leasing out a hospital building.
“Very few cities have this fund like I’m describing to you,” Miyagishima said. “And if you stop and think about it, what about all the savings that the federal government is saving right now? Normally it’d be a federal employee doing a lot of this work, and we have volunteers doing it.”
According to the city’s interim manager, William Studer, the city was planning to submit a list of expenses to FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter National Board Program in late July, and was hopeful that funds would be disbursed within 60 days of approval. FEMA is supposed to reimburse funds already spent as well as supplement future expenditures through September 2020, covering such items as food, lodging in shelters or hotels, transportation costs, and basic necessities like hygiene products and diapers. Las Cruces expects to spend $90,000 per week for the next year. Together with the half million in reimbursement it’s already seeking, that will put its total request at $5.5 million.
And that’s just one town.
With only $30 million budgeted by Congress, it’s difficult to see how every town or nonprofit organization that contributed to the relief effort will be fully compensated by the federal government. The costs to Annunciation House and the city of McAllen each reached at least $1 million, while the state of New Mexico and the city of Albuquerque claimed total expenses of $1 million. Among Las Cruces, McAllen, and the state of New Mexico, that’s already approaching a third of the budgeted funds. Yet nearly two dozen other cities likely expended far more than usual on caring for asylum-seekers, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Berkeley, Dallas, Denver, Austin, Phoenix, and Tucson, and a smattering of smaller towns in all four border states.
Although charities can request funds, it’s hard to imagine the smaller ones successfully navigating a bureaucratic process that hasn’t been widely publicized.
On a Tuesday evening in early June, I checked in with one of these charities: Mustard Seed & Rainbow Ministries, a tiny church located in Chaparral, New Mexico, a community some 30 miles southeast of Las Cruces. The setting sun cast orange and purple hues over the red earth. Inside, rows of mustard-colored pews filled the main hall, while smaller rooms were stuffed with cots, piles of dirty laundry, and boxes of clean donated clothing and hygiene supplies.
Since February, the church had been taking in about 60 asylum-seekers at a time from nearby El Paso. By the time of my visit, their last group had numbered around 25. While Pastors Joe and Iliana San Nicholas said they found their work spiritually rewarding—the church’s Facebook page features videos of asylum-seekers singing Christian songs—they were both clearly exhausted. During the weeks when migrants stayed with them, they sometimes had to stay awake until four in the morning waiting with them at the bus station—only to then have to transport another group to the airport a few hours later.
“It’s been rough,” Iliana said. “But I understand, as a Christian and as a pastor, that when you start tapping into the kingdom of God and what God expects us to do, [helping refugees] is one of them, because God loves the immigrants.”

PAUL RATJE/AFP/Getty Images
A Guatemalan woman looks at a map of the United States at The House of Refugee, a new center opened by the Annunciation House to help the large flow of migrants being released by the United States Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso, Texas on April 24, 2019.
For weeks, Iliana had tried asking the city of Las Cruces for financial help. Officials gave her the run-around, she said, and in the end told her that the funds it was sending to nonprofit organizations were only for those based in the city proper. The couple estimates they’ve spent more than $10,000 of their own money on the effort, handing out cash to families and purchasing backpacks, clothes, food, soap, toothpaste, and gasoline. They’ve barely scraped by. The church’s small septic system wasn’t able to handle the volume of people using the facilities, and had to be replaced at a cost of $3,700—a discount, Iliana said, offered by a plumber connected with the church. When asked in early August if she planned to apply for FEMA funds, Iliana said it was the first time she’d heard it was possible.
At the bus station in March in downtown McAllen, the city’s old, clustered core, about two dozen asylum-seekers waited to buy bus tickets, clutching manila envelopes containing documents from CBP and ICE. Their intended destinations were written on the front of the envelopes. It has been a familiar sight since 2014, but a near constant one this past March.
One of these asylum-seekers was Suyapa, from a small fishing village near the capital of Honduras. She and her family had made their living by fishing, but said that gangs demanding bribes to operate their boat made the business impossible. So she fled with her daughter, who sat nearby blowing on a noisemaker as the pair waited to board a bus to Dallas.
In Honduras, Suyapa said, her eyes misting with tears, “I couldn’t work anymore, I couldn’t bring home bread for my children.” After walking to the border for three months, she was held at a Border Patrol processing facility in McAllen known among migrants as the perrera—the dog kennel—for its cage-like cells. Then Border Patrol took her and her daughter to the city’s Catholic Charities respite center, where she received fresh clothing and volunteers ordered pizza for her cohort. She planned to stay with a friend until her asylum hearing; in the meantime, she will have to periodically check in with an ICE officer by phone.
Americans, she said, “need to understand that if we come here, it’s out of necessity, because we’d rather live back home. Life there, the gangs make it so difficult.”
Suyapa was arguably one of the lucky ones, arriving in the U.S. before the federal government expanded its Remain in Mexico program, which requires most Central American asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their day in an American court. Since its implementation, the number of asylum-seekers arriving to humanitarian centers in McAllen, Brownsville, and El Paso have significantly fallen, from hundreds to as little as a dozen or fewer a day. Piloted in San Diego and then El Paso, the program was expanded by the Trump administration in an arrangement with Mexico across the entire border beginning in June, with Mexico expecting to receive as many as 60,000 asylum-seekers to Mexican border cities, where the threat of violence and kidnapping is so severe and access to lawyers so difficult many have given up on their asylum claims. Recently, Mexican authorities in some cities have transported asylum-seekers deeper into the country, as far as Monterrey, in northeast Nuevo León, and even Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala. The policy and others are apparently meant to block asylum-seekers, as one National Security Council official admitted in an internal email. The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the policy.
On the diplomatic front, the Trump administration in late July strong-armed the Guatemalan government—the top sending country for families this year—into accepting a “safe third country agreement” in which migrants who passed through Guatemala would be required to first seek asylum there. The national asylum agency in Guatemala employs less than 10 people; the move appears to be yet another impossible barrier meant to discourage people from requesting asylum in the U.S.
For Ruben Garcia in El Paso, the federal government’s callous position on asylum is a moral crisis of historic proportions. At the Annunciation House in early June, while he was still regularly assisting upwards of 500 asylum seekers a day, he compared the responsibility of caring for and housing refugees with past tests of the nation’s character, including the Civil War. This is one of those moments, he said, when the country defines itself. “When we say, ‘All men are created equal’ in 2019, it has to include migrants and refugees,” he said.
“It’s very inconvenient to have tens of thousands of refugees arriving. It’s very inconvenient. It’s a lot of work. But it’s eminently possible,” he said. “That hard work is what makes us who we are. That’s where our pride comes from. Let’s be busy with that.”
This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations.