‘Chaos has Gone’ from Streets of El Paso, but Bishop Sietz isn’t Happy

Bishop Sietz is chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration. Catholic NGOs collected over $3 billion in taxpayer funds assisting illegal immigrants under the Biden Administration.

In Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, the immigration debate has spilled into the streets, sparking almost daily demonstrations while immigration agents ramp up arrests.

But in El Paso – a city in Texas on the US-Mexico border – the streets are unusually quiet.

A year after the BBC last visited the border to understand the impact of the migrant crisis on the border, sites that were once teeming with migrants lie largely silent.

Just a few years ago, as many as 2,500 migrants once camped outside the city’s historic Sacred Heart Catholic church. Many lined the streets sleeping on donated blankets, idling while they waited for food and water to be distributed by local charities.

Now, only a handful of parishioners can be seen coming in and out of the church.

The same is true of a nearby park and of shelters throughout the city, where migrants once huddled to exchange their experiences of trudging through jungles and deserts or being detained, robbed or nearly kidnapped on their long journeys through Latin America to the border.

The influx prompted El Paso’s government to declare a state of emergency in late 2022 as local shelters ballooned beyond capacity.

Then, when US President Donald Trump came into office in January – elected in part because of his promise to fix the border – the regular flow of migrants into El Paso slowed to a trickle.

It is a trend that has repeated itself along the length of the 1,900-mile (3,145km) border, from the Pacific Coast in California to Texas’ Gulf coast.

Figures for detentions of border crossers are at a 50-year low.

In September alone – the last month for which complete data is available – 11,647 people were detained along the entirety of the US-Mexico border, compared with 101,000 in September 2024 and 269,700 the same month in 2023.

One volunteer network, Annunciation House, once ran as many as 22 shelters throughout the region, catering in large part to thousands of migrants paroled into the US to await court dates, often years in the future.

There are now only two. The relative trickle of migrants – 15 to 20 in each location on a given night – is composed, in part, of those headed back home after years in the US.

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