The federal failure to enact workable immigration and border enforcement policies has impacted San Diego for decades.
That’s been on display in recent days as the U.S. Border Patrol released newly-arrived migrants at a local transit center.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there was conflict over what should be done to address the heavy influx of migrants, and the split wasn’t entirely partisan.
A county-funded center to assist newly arriving migrants closed last week amid a growing caseload and a shortage of money. The center went through $6 million approved by the county Board of Supervisors faster than anticipated, and officials said ongoing county funding would be unsustainable.
A primary service at the center was to help migrants get to their ultimate destination, which usually was outside of San Diego County.
The result, once again, has been what supervisors call “street releases” by border agents, who drop often-bewildered migrants at the Iris Avenue Transit Center. Some aid groups and volunteers try to help the migrants, but it’s a more chaotic process than when the center was open, and means some migrants hang around town longer than before.
The Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday to seek federal money to establish another center. The request was backed by three Democrats and Republican Joel Anderson, who said his East County District, specifically El Cajon, can no longer handle the stream of migrants.
“You could define this as federally sponsored homelessness,” he said.
Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond, who along with the others had appealed for federal assistance before, was the lone “no” vote. He said on Tuesday that allowing a federally-funded shelter would be “complicit with the federal government and the current mess.”
On the same day, Sen. Laphonza Butler, the California Democrat who was appointed to temporarily fill the late Dianne Feinstein’s seat, called for immediate additional funding for San Diego’s migrant response through the federal Shelter and Services Program. The request was made in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Biden istration officials.
“This funding will provide migrants with access to essential services, including food and shelter, following the closure of a transitional assistance center in San Diego that was serving up to 1,200 migrants per day,” Butler said in a statement.
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, whose districts overlaps with much of Anderson’s, had a blunt reaction to the senator’s request.
“Hell no. The American people reject (President Joe) Biden’s open borders and blank checks,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
On Fox Business Network, Issa said Biden needs to show the U.S. “isn’t the land of freebies.” Issa said other cities such as New York and Chicago that also are struggling to assist incoming migrants shouldn’t get federal help, either.
“They said they were sanctuary cities; my whole state said it was a sanctuary state, let them pay for it,” he said.
While Anderson signed on to the county’s federal funding request, he also proposed that the supervisors urge Biden to “temporarily close the U.S.-Mexico border,” something Issa also has called for.
That caused a stir at the board meeting and Anderson said he was only talking about shutting down immigration for a while, not normal cross-border transit and commerce. His motion was not adopted.
The supervisors then unanimously backed a letter proposed by Democratic Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer ing a bipartisan federal immigration reform bill to address the situation at the border. They did not specifically target the bipartisan compromise measure that failed in the Senate after House Republicans said it would be dead on arrival.
That bill combined military assistance for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan with enhanced border enforcement that was weighted toward Republicans, with a limit on migrant processing and tougher asylum standards.
In San Diego, Border Patrol officials say they are forced to drop migrants off at transit centers after the local center closed because federal facilities are overcrowded and understaffed. The bipartisan bill also would have provided more money for agents, facilities, equipment and technology along the border.
The measure was backed by the border agents’ union, the National Border Patrol Council, though that stance turned into an odd political juxtaposition with subsequent comments by the union’s president, Brandon Judd.
“There are such huge benefits in this bill to border security that stops people from gaming the system,” Judd told the Deseret News in early February.
The bill only would have allowed asylum claims at official ports of entry and granted Border Patrol agents new authority to conduct “credible fear” interviews at the border to determine whether someone qualifies for further legal steps.
Judd said the bar for ing such interviews, and being granted entrance into the United States, also would be “raised exponentially,” which former President Donald Trump attempted to do.
He said many of the criticisms of the bill by Republicans were intentionally misleading or false, according to the Deseret News.
The bill was backed by Biden, but not by Trump, whose opposition virtually guaranteed it didn’t stand a chance with House Republicans and many GOP senators.
After Biden and Trump announced their plans to visit the border in Texas on Thursday, Judd, who has endorsed Trump, ripped into the current commander in chief.
“Unfortunately, a visit by President Biden three years into his term and after repeatedly stating there is no crisis is too little, too late,” Judd said in a statement this week. “. . . But even if he were to put the proper policies in place at this late hour, he’d be doing it only to try to save his presidency.”
Critics accused Trump of scuttling the bill that might have helped settle chaos along the border in an attempt to win back the White House. Some GOP senators said they will never get a bill so loaded with Republican immigration priorities as this one over the next four years, even if Trump becomes president again.
“Border security should never be about politics,” Judd said, “it should always be about the safety and security of this great nation and the American people.”
That’s a nice sentiment, but border security is always about politics.
