The Border Patrol began releasing illegal aliens onto the streets of San Diego last week after local funding for migrant resources ran out.
The illegal aliens being released onto the city streets of San Diego County are “predominantly single adults, and predominantly men,” Jim Desmond, a San Diego County supervisor, told The Daily Signal.
Desmond said he has seen or spoken with illegal aliens from Haiti, India, China, Ecuador, and Guinea released onto the streets of San Diego.
“It’s the U.N. coming across our border,” he said, noting that the majority don’t want to stay in San Diego. While speaking with some of the illegal aliens released onto the streets, Desmond says they have asked him how to get to Virginia or New Jersey.
Since October, San Diego taxpayers have funded $6 million in services to the San Diego Migrant Welcome Center, which provided meals, shelter, travel resources, and more to illegal aliens.
The San Diego Migrant Welcome Center processed 81,000 migrants since October, according to KUSI-TV, Fox 5 San Diego. The Border Patrol dropped the illegal aliens off and the “welcome center” did the rest.
The analogy has been made, according to Desmond, that the “Border Patrol has been their Uber, and San Diego County was their travel agent.”
After going through more than a $1 million a month in taxpayer funding, the center for illegal aliens was forced to shut down, which triggered the street releases.
Since the illegal alien center opened, Desmond says, he has been against using local taxpayer dollars to fund it. “I thought the federal government should have been paying for that the whole time,” he said, adding that “fortunately, my colleagues, after $6 million, decided, ‘OK, this is unsustainable. The numbers keep growing. We can’t continue to do this.’”
Now, the Border Patrol is dropping illegal aliens off at a transit station in the county, “and currently, some of the nonprofits are picking them up, in buses and taking them, right now, to the airport,” the county supervisor said. “And so the San Diego airport is now a migrant shelter.”
More than 1,500 illegal aliens have been dropped off at the airport in recent days, according to reports. Fox 5 reports that the airport is working with nonprofits and volunteer groups to help book airline tickets for the illegal aliens.
The five-member San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted this week to establish “a migrant shelter and have the federal government pay for it,” Desmond said, noting he was the only “no” vote on the initiative. He says he opposes the plan because he does “not want to be part, or complicit with, a failed process and just abetting that failed process by opening up a migrant shelter so we can continue to allow in more people than we can handle or manage in the United States.”
Desmond says he wants a real solution to the border crisis, which he says involves securing the border, because what the federal government is doing is allowing illegal crossers to “cut ahead of the line of any legal immigration.”
The San Diego Sector includes 56,831 square miles and all of San Diego County, according to Customs and Border Protection. Since the start of fiscal year 2024 on Oct. 1, CBP has encountered more than 120,000 illegal aliens in the San Diego Sector, putting the sector on track to break the record of the more 230,000 illegal aliens encountered in fiscal year 2023.
“People are just walking in, and with Border Patrol agents there and watching this happen,” Desmond said, adding that he does not blame Border Patrol agents because they are just following the “directives that they’re given.” But instead of watching illegal aliens walk through holes in the border fence, he said, agents should be “stopping them at the fence.”
San Diego is not alone in closing centers for illegal aliens. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced Wednesday that the city will close four shelters for illegal immigrants in the coming weeks. The move is reported to reduce Denver’s budget deficit by about $60 million and allow more funding for city services.
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