https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/20/migrants-el-paso-texas-shelter/ From Texas Tribune
Less than two weeks before the end of the federal fiscal year, encounters between migrants and Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border have already surpassed 2 million — a new record. According to federal government statistics, immigration agents encountered nearly 154,000 Venezuelans along the U.S.-Mexico border in the first 11 months of this fiscal year — a 216% increase from the entire previous fiscal year.
In recent weeks, Venezuelans have arrived in increasing numbers to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region. Shelters are so full in El Paso that Border Patrol officials have released migrants on the street. Migrants who are apprehended or surrender at the border are processed and held while agents determine whether they can be sent to Mexico under the emergency health order known as Title 42.
But Venezuelans can’t be sent across the border because they’re on the list of nationalities Mexico won’t accept. And they can’t be deported back to their country because the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Venezuela in 2019. Instead, they are released to local shelters.
But with no space at the shelters, for the past two weeks, dozens of migrants have slept on the sidewalk next to the bus station, many of them wearing sweatpants, dirt-covered T-shirts and sandals. Some have tents where they can get out of the sun and rain. The area, just south of a baseball stadium where the El Paso Chihuahuas minor league baseball team plays, smells of body odor, of urine and “like someone took a shit,” as Arteaga’s wife put it.
Hundreds of migrants crowded inside the welcome center late last week, charging their cellphones so they could call family members or lining up to board charter buses. Angel Morano, a 21-year-old who also fled Venezuela, anxiously waited outside for immigration officials to drop off two friends who had traveled with him to the border. He said he left his country because it’s hard to make a living, but he missed his parents.
Venezuela has been going through social unrest and political turmoil since 2014, when the country’s economy — which depends heavily on oil revenues — began to collapse. What was one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America has fallen into chaos because of falling oil prices, political corruption, and American sanctions against the country’s oil and mining industries and the Central Bank of Venezuela. The sanctions are aimed at ousting the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who has been accused of election fraud, human rights violations and running an authoritarian government.