On the U.S. side of the border, organizations in San Diego have a rapid response team that get daily calls from ICE saying they are releasing people from detention facilities who will need assistance to find a place to stay while they await a judge's decision to allow them to work while the final adjudication of their case is made, which may take many months.
The detention facilities are overcrowded, frigidly cold and very unfriendly. "I feel like I am trash," immigrant children say as they describe the conditions in the detention facilities.
In response, a local coalition of nonprofit organizations known as the San Diego Rapid Response Network, including Jewish Family Service, Safe Harbors and the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties has provides shelter for asylum-seekers who are typically only in San Diego for 24 or 48 hours before taking Greyhound buses or flying to be reunited with family elsewhere in the U.S.
I had lunch one day in San Diego with a friend who has opened her home to a family awaiting adjudication of their asylum application. The father, mother and teenage son are Jehovah Witnesses from Russia. After waiting for six months in Mexico, they were allowed into the U.S. and put in a detention facility. They were placed with my friend through the Safe Harbors program, which has 11 more Russians in two family units they have sheltered. Both parents wear ankle bracelets as they wait for second hearing to determine if they can work in the U.S. while waiting for final adjudication of their asylum case.
ICE has used Safe Harbors as its drop off location for pregnant women or for women who have just given birth in San Diego hospitals. The ministry's founder Pastor Bill Jenkins said that 24 babies have been born to women seeking asylum living in the church in the past year (2018) about one every two weeks. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm running a shelter or a maternity ward," Jenkins said. Despite San Diego being located at one of the busiest border crossings in the United States, Christ Ministry Center and Safe Harbor is the only long-term shelter in San Diego for persons seeking asylum.
The bottom line is that a large number of persons seeking asylum are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. judicial system is unable to handle such a number with the current number of judges. Persons are in detention facilities for months before finally being patrolled into families and communities that are willing to accept them. The strain on government and community resources at the border are at a breaking point.
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