Asylum seekers released in Yuma

Border Patrol facilities too full to handle people

At least 200 members of families seeking asylum in the U.S. were released on their own recognizance in the Yuma area last week, according to nonprofit and city leaders.

This happened after available detention facilities for families with children in the Yuma Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol were too full to handle the number of people coming through, according to national media reports.

The Yuma office of Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona and the Yuma Refugee Ministry provided a four- to five-day response, which ended Oct. 11, to help 200 people released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, said Teresa Cavendish, director of operations for the organization based in Tucson.

“None of them remain in the community, none of them,” she said. “They have places to go, outside in other states, where they all have sponsors, and they’re traveling to meet their sponsors.”

When these immigrants were released by ICE, representatives of the local social services office and ministry were waiting for them, and “we worked to help these folks contact their sponsors, arrange for bus tickets or plane tickets, that were mostly paid for by their sponsors, or were donated.

“And then we made the travel arrangements for these folks; none of them remain in the Yuma community. The effort has been shut down, and it’s all done,” she said.

Travel had to be arranged quickly, she said, because the immigrants, who are issued ankle monitors before their release, are required to appear within 15 days at an immigration court location near where their sponsors live.

She said no other local nonprofits were contacted for additional support for

the effort. Hotel rooms were made available for the families to stay in overnight.

According to national media reports, ICE began releasing larger groups of “family units,” consisting of parents and children, in southern Arizona beginning Oct. 7, as record levels of these immigrants filled the available detention facilities.

The ICE public information office has not answered the Yuma Sun’s questions about how many individuals have been released in the Yuma sector.

Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls said Wednesday he was contacted by ICE officials about two weeks earlier, who informed him the agency would be releasing more families into the Yuma area.

He said he wasn’t told then how many individuals might be released, and still doesn’t know the figure, but the number of refugees being released into Yuma had appeared to be a normal, much smaller number.

ICE’s original intent was to release the immigrants without any “transition plan” once they reached the streets, he said, at which point he contacted the offices of U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, Rep. Martha McSally and other Arizona members of Congress to ask for help in pressuring the federal agency to change approaches.

“That’s not sustainable, for our community to have a large number of people who are released into our community, who are essentially homeless,” he said.

About 200 people within family units were apprehended in one day during the week before he was contacted by ICE, he said.

In the end, a group of local nonprofits, which he wouldn’t name, collaborated to find shelter and assistance for the refugees in what Nicholls said will be a “one-time” solution.

But he said he hoped his message about the need for a more organized response reaches U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

“I would hope and will continue to push on that with Customs and Border Patrol,” the mayor said.

Kyl did ask Nielsen about what was happening in Yuma during a congressional hearing last week on “Threats to the Homeland,” and McSally brought the topic up in a response to an immigration-related question in her televised debate Monday against Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, her opponent in the race for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat.

“Right now the cartels know right now the reality of the situation is, if you’re with a kid, you’re going to be let go. Just this weekend, I got a call from the Yuma mayor, he was panicked, saying that 200 or more people were going to be let go every single day, into Yuma, and they didn’t have the capacity, and they showed up with a kid,” she said.