El Paso grapples with migrant shelter overflow: City steps up with hotel accommodation amid capacity issues

Migrants outside Sacred Heart Church.
CREDIT: KFOX14/CBS4.

CBS4
by Jonathan Mejia
Mon, August 14th 2023, 11:00 PM CDT

EL PASO, Texas (CBS4) — For a month now shelters that have been housing migrants in El Paso have been operating over capacity and while the city has stepped up by putting some migrants in hotels, they know the situation could change at any moment.

That's why the city is making plans now before it could get worse.

"We gotta be prepared for the unknown we don't know every night, how many people are gonna come. We don't know that the mxi whether it will be family, children, single adults," Oscar Leeser, the Mayor of El Paso. said.

Leeser shared his thoughts following a presentation from the Office of Emergency Management about their response to the migrant situation.

OEM has 46 people who help get migrants to and from hotels and the airport.

They also coordinate with local shelters to make room for people who entered the country legally on asylum claims through the CBP One App.

"It appears that the numbers of encounters at the border have decreased. So we're for now just utilizing hotel shelter to help support our NGOs." Jorge Rodriguez, the Coordinator for the Office of Emergency Management, said.

The Office of Emergency Management said the El Paso border sector is seeing about 700 to 1,000 migrant encounters a day over the last week.

Shelters in El Paso said even with the city putting some of those people in hotels, they're still dealing with overcrowded shelters.

"There are a large number of sites, whether they be shelters or hospitality sites, they’re working with several hundred migrants and many cases on a given day," John Martin, the Deputy Director for the Opportunity Center for the Homeless, said.

In May the city was able to use vacant Bassett and Morehead Middle schools to house migrants but city leaders are preparing to work around a bill passed by the Republican--led U.S. House of Representatives that would block the use of schools as shelters for migrants in case the bill passes the Democratic-controlled Senate and becomes law.

"We’re in the process of trying to purchase Morehead; when we secure that hopefully that will be a long-term operations for us," Rodriguez said.

"It’s unfortunate because I believe we’ve used them in the past. It would’ve been easier to kick those in but now we have to look at other options at this point," Martin said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said while we're seeing more migrants arrive at shelters it's not because they are dropping them off on the streets as we've seen in the past.

CBP said they are only releasing people who have crossed the border and have shown enough credible fear to receive a court date.

The City of El Paso has a Migrant Situational Awareness Dashboard that provides information regarding the migrant situation to can be viewed here.