THIS IS WHAT THE COUNTY SHOULD DO NOW FOR REFUGEES
In October 2018, volunteers answering a hotline for the San Diego Rapid Response Network, a coalition of attorneys, community leaders and employees of human rights and nonprofit organizations, began receiving urgent calls about groups of migrant families, many of them with young children. They were being released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at bus stations and McDonald’s restaurant parking lots around the region, rather than provided with travel assistance to ensure they made it to their final destinations elsewhere in the country to wait for their asylum hearings.
These families, legally allowed into the country to pursue asylum claims in the U.S., were being intentionally abandoned by the U.S. government with no resources and no way to reach their loved ones in other parts of the country.
The San Diego Rapid Response Network quickly sprang into action. The network set up a makeshift shelter and began providing food, clothing, temporary shelter, case management, medical screenings and legal support to help people travel to their intended destinations across the nation. Within a year, San Diego Rapid Response Network Migrant Shelter Services was California’s de facto first responder to the humanitarian crisis created by the Trump administration’s misguided policies to disrupt our asylum system.
In four years, the shelter has moved seven times, grown to four times its original size and adjusted to providing services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Operated by Jewish Family Service of San Diego, it has welcomed, sheltered and supported more than 120,000 individuals and families — up to 200 people per day — who otherwise would have ended up on the streets of San Diego County.
As representatives of ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and SEIU Local 211, our respective organizations, we serve on the steering committee. Together with others in the region, our organizations have demonstrated San Diego County’s commitment and capacity to welcome people humanely.
SEIU Local 221 hired a consultant to build the organizational structure of the shelter, then provided organizers and staff to support this humanitarian effort. Many of our union members, including registered nurses, social workers and custodians, provide a broad range of health and social services in our communities, and come from immigrant families or live cross-border lives themselves in our binational region.
The ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties helped establish, grow and maintain the San Diego Rapid Response Network and its shelter services by tapping into our deep reservoir of community leaders and volunteers to help staff an overflow shelter in a Barrio Logan church on Christmas Eve 2018. Ordinary people — some of them immigrants themselves — came together to help because they imagined that any of the families sleeping at the church could have been their own.
Our community’s ongoing response offers a hopeful glimpse of what is possible when people come together to help people in need.
This life-saving work is possible with bipartisan support, funding from the state and private philanthropy, along with the assistance of nonprofit organizations, dedicated volunteers and staff.
The need for humanitarian services is likely to grow, not diminish, in the weeks and months to come. The use of Title 42, a cruel public health policy implemented by the Trump administration to prohibit most people from seeking asylum at the border, could be nearing its end.
Federal, state and local governments must work together to fix our nation’s broken immigration system and rapidly invest in and develop the infrastructure necessary to welcome and support people seeking asylum.
Nongovernmental organizations, like the San Diego Rapid Response Network, have proven it’s possible to welcome people with humanity and dignity, but more resources are needed to continue to provide these services with engagement from all levels of government to ensure the operation is properly sustained.
In a vital step, San Diego County Board of Supervisors Chair Nora Vargas, a Democrat,
and Supervisor Joel Anderson, a Republican, are calling for the creation of a response plan to ensure that “asylum seekers and refugees are treated with dignity” and that the resources needed to provide the basic needs for asylum seekers exist.
On behalf of the San Diego Rapid Response Network, we urge the Board of Supervisors to support this at its meeting on Tuesday. The time is now for county leaders to show other municipalities in our region and beyond that San Diego County is part of the solution. The time is now to allocate funds and develop the infrastructure needed to help people seeking asylum. The time is now to welcome newcomers with dignity.
San Diego will always be a border community made up of fronterizos, with binational workers, commerce and travel at the busiest international border crossing in the western hemisphere. Our region has experienced first-hand the benefits of a diverse community, enriched and revitalized by new immigrants. It’s our shared responsibility, as individuals, as organizations and at all levels of government, to ensure, as the San Diego Rapid Response Network’s mission says, that “no one stands alone in our community.”
Chávez-Peterson is the executive director of the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. Garcias is the former president of SEIU Local 221. They both serve on the steering committee of the San Diego Rapid Response Network and both live in Chula Vista.