Before President Biden’s anticipated Sunday visit to the overcrowded border town, authorities in El Paso have started dismantling migrant encampments under cover of darkness and sending hundreds of people across the border to Mexico.
First Visit
As the city gets ready to host President Biden’s first visit to the southern border, encampments close to the downtown bus station and the Sacred Heart Church, which runs a shelter, have been dismantled by local authorities over the last two nights, according to a photographer for The Post who saw it.
On Saturday, while police guided scores more to a pedestrian crossing, six buses packed with primarily Venezuelan migrants were seen crossing a downtown bridge into Ciudad Juarez, the border city in Mexico.
At least 200 individuals were deported back to Mexico on Saturday, according to a Border Patrol agent who did not want to be named.
According to Maria Rodriguez, 23, from Venezuela, who told The Post she has spent the past three days sleeping in an El Paso dumpster, “people are saying that if you are out in the streets the Border Patrol will get you and deport you because the President is coming to El Paso and they don’t want to show him the reality of things.” We took a lot of guts to emerge from that dumpster after three days, so I hope we find refuge tonight. We simply don’t want to keep running. All we need is one chance, please.
Migrant Says
Another migrant from Venezuela told The Washington Post that he had been camped out on the porch of a nearby church and was upset with Biden for making empty promises to them prior to his inauguration in 2021.
Joan Enriquez, a 21-year-old, claimed, “I genuinely think politicians are messing with us.” Democrats and Republicans on both sides. We give them kudos because, like Biden, they initially pretended to want to assist us before closing the border and making it impossible for us to obtain legal status in this nation.
Authorities in El Paso came under fire from critics for attempting to calm the unrest in time for Biden’s arrival.
El Paso is being restored as though nothing strange had occurred there. Right on schedule for Biden’s “visit to the border,” the Border Patrol Union tweeted. “We propose having him arrive in Des Moines, Iowa, while claiming to be in El Paso. He won’t understand the distinction.
The Border Patrol Union has expressed concerns about low morale among frontline officers who have dealt with a historically high volume of migrants entering the country illegally in fiscal 2022. Tens of thousands of migrants have poured into El Paso in recent weeks, bringing the total number of migrants who have crossed the roughly 2,000-mile border with Mexico to over 2.4 million.
With thousands of migrants coming into El Paso every week, the situation became so chaotic that Oscar Leeser, the mayor of the border metropolis of more than 670,000 people, declared a state of emergency last month.
Republican Congresswoman Mayra Flores, who represents South Texas, claimed that El Paso has cleared its downtown area of large migrant camps before of Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival. Why not demonstrate to him what our border community and law enforcement personnel go through every day.
State Of Emergency
Before the deadline on Wednesday to abolish a COVID-era policy that would have resulted in more than 6,000 migrants crossing the border each day into an already overburdened city where hundreds are already sleeping on the streets, the mayor of El Paso issued a state of emergency on Saturday.
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser declared during a specially arranged press conference to announce the emergency measures that “our asylum seekers are not secure.” “That’s not how we treat our people, yet we have hundreds of thousands on the streets.”
According to him, the city’s temperature has dropped into the 20s, and newly freed refugees are camped out on the city’s sidewalks.
