At 8:59 p.m. Thursday, a major policy that fundamentally changed migrant processing at the border will end.
Title 42, put in place with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, blocked asylum seekers and other migrants from entering ports of entry and expelled them back to Mexico if they crossed the border without permission. Though legal battles kept the policy around longer than the Biden istration intended, the public health emergency order that made the policy possible is expiring at the end of the day — 11:59 p.m. Eastern time — meaning that Title 42 must end as well.
In its place, the Biden istration has prepared a slew of policy changes aimed to punish asylum seekers who cross the border without using a smartphone application called CBP One to make appointments at ports of entry to request protection in the United States.
Officials have said they anticipate an increase in border crossings as Title 42 goes away, and in other parts of the border, officials have acknowledged they are already seeing a rise. San Diego officials have declined to provide those statistics.
While politicians, government officials and media outlets on both sides of the border are focused on what could happen in the coming days, on the eve of the changes, the San Diego-Tijuana region didn’t look much different from how it has appeared in recent weeks.
On Wednesday morning, migrants around the city turned to their smartphones to try to get appointments in CBP One, just as they have done since January. For most, the morning ended in frustration as the app froze or flashed error messages, meaning that they didn’t get appointments and would have to try again the next day.
At El Chaparral Plaza, which lies on the south side of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, those lucky enough to land appointments in the app two weeks ago lined up, following instructions from Mexican immigration officials, before walking to the border line to request asylum.
Though their appointments were at noon, many migrants arrived hours early, some at 7 a.m. By 10 a.m., there were already more than 30 people waiting, including families from Kazakhstan, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela.
Just over a mile west of the port of entry, more than 200 people waited in an area between the two layers of border wall that has become an open-air holding cell for Border Patrol. Tarps strung along the border wall to make makeshift tents reflected in the afternoon sun as children played and adults huddled in self-organized groups according to when they’d arrived.
Several families said they’d been waiting for two to four days to be processed.
Border Patrol has been holding migrants for extended periods of time between the border walls in the region since at least October of last year, but the practice became more frequently observed in recent months. Recently, the agency has added a portable toilet, and agents began putting wristbands on the migrants that say which day they were apprehended.
The migrants waiting on Wednesday complained of cold, wet nights and lack of food. One woman from Ecuador said she hadn’t eaten in three days. She waited in a group by the border wall closer to Tijuana to get food from food delivery workers.
Delivery drivers from Uber Eats and Rey Del Pollo made regular visits to the Tijuana side of the wall to slide bags of food through the space between the bollards.
The worker for Rey Del Pollo called the store to take more orders after handing out the food he brought. Once he gathered as many orders as would fit in the box behind his motorcycle, he left with wads of cash — a mix of pesos and dollars — and returned with the food. As he shoved the plastic bags filled with Styrofoam containers through the slats, some caught on the bollards, spilling their contents inside the bags.
Among those waiting were migrants from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Turkey.
One Colombian man said that he had come to the United States for economic opportunities. He’d crossed the border with his wife and 7-year-old son through a small hole in the wall, he said.
“We’re here for a better life,” he told the Union-Tribune in Spanish.
Another Colombian man said that he’d fled political violence and had the evidence to prove it. He said he’d heard Title 42 was ending and that he would need to request asylum before it ended because of the pending rule changes.
It is unclear when the two men will be processed and whether a rule limiting asylum eligibility that goes into effect on Friday will be applied in their cases.
Meanwhile, officials in both Mexico and the United States seem eager to show they have law enforcement forces ready for whatever may come as Title 42 goes away. There was a visible uptick in the presence of the Mexican National Guard along the border both at the port of entry and along the border wall on Wednesday.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection was planning to hold an operational readiness exercise at the San Ysidro Port of Entry Wednesday night. The agency said it shouldn’t cause disruptions to border traffic.
San Diego officials have called on the federal government for more resources to address any uptick in migrants released in the area.
San Diego County has two shelters that receive government funds to temporarily house migrants once they’re released from the border. The shelters help those migrants travel on to their final destinations around the country.
Vino Pajanor, CEO of Catholic Charities, said that his organization’s shelter had hired more staff and had the capacity to take more people than were currently in its care.
The San Diego Rapid Response Network Migrant Shelter said its capacity would remain the same in the coming days.
“We need to be able to increase the migrant shelter capacity. That’s our message to the federal government,” said Nora Vargas, chair of the county Board of Supervisors. “This is a different county than it was before. We as a county understand that this is a federal issue, and we need to make sure that there is a response from the federal government.”
She noted that the county is helping the existing shelters with medical screenings, and the county is working to identify additional shelter partners, she said. She encouraged residents to call 211 if they come across migrants who seem to be lost or without a place to go.
The head of East County’s largest city asked FEMA to step in.
“I am sympathetic to those being left in El Cajon,” Mayor Bill Wells wrote in a recent letter to the federal government, but the city “is not equipped to be a refugee center.”
Wells asked for funds as well as a federal representative who has “authority to make meaningful decisions” to be on the ground, coordinating care.
The mayor said he was concerned about more people ending up on the street. The region has already seen a rise in homeless people, and El Cajon has what is essentially East County’s only shelter.
County Supervisor Joel Anderson has also written the White House to ask that dramatically more money be directed to organizations and local governments helping asylum seekers, saying the potential increase was a “major concern.”
Hospitals and emergency medical experts across the region are bracing for a possible increase in demand for medical attention from border crossers.
As documented by the Union-Tribune in 2022, migrants falling from the top of the now-taller border wall have sustained gruesome injuries that have required surgeries and long recuperation in some San Diego-area hospitals.
Recently, Scripps Chula Vista has observed an increase in the number of “unprocessed” migrants being transported directly from the border by ambulance rather than in the formal custody of the Border Patrol, including eight who arrived Tuesday morning, said Chris Van Gorder, Scripps’ chief executive officer.
On the Tijuana side, shelters remain full, according to Enrique Lucero, who is in charge of the city’s migrant affairs office. He estimated that roughly 5,000 people are in Tijuana’s migrant shelters currently.
The governor of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, said Wednesday that the state will create places where migrants can access internet and make their appointments online using the app.
The general secretary of government for Baja, Catalino Zavala, said that there are 42 migrant shelters in the state. He added that because of an increase in arrivals, the state is planning to open two more in Tijuana.
Union-Tribune staff writers Alexandra Mendoza, Paul Sisson and Blake Nelson contributed to this report.
