Inside El Paso’s Downtown convention center, border security industry executives and Homeland Security’s top brass mingled over coffee and pastry at the opening of a two-day Border Security Expo.
Outside, blocks away at the U.S.-Mexico border, a massive transformation in border enforcement was underway. The Title 42 pandemic-era policy ends Thursday night and, with it, border authorities’ ability to quickly expel migrants.
“How do we address the crisis, this challenge?” U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz asked during a panel discussion at the expo on Wednesday. “You have to separate the missions. You have a border security mission and you have a humanitarian mission. Sometimes they collide, but we want to try to manage those equally.”
The collision of border “missions” — security and humanitarian — during this week of border enforcement transformation pushed Homeland Security leaders, stakeholders and immigrant advocates into unchartered territory managing a border crisis in El Paso.
Twenty years ago, Congress established the Department of Homeland Security. The new agency was supposed to hold all the functions of counter-terrorism; border security; immigration enforcement and immigrant services; and federal law enforcement under one umbrella.
The agency is being tested this week as it tries to manage the end of Title 42 without prolonged chaos for its agents, migrants and border communities.
Jeremy Slack, an immigration expert at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of “Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the U.S. Mexico Border,” studies hemispheric migration patterns and has watched the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the border city where he lives and works.
More than 3,300 migrants were living in homeless conditions Downtown for days after crossing the U.S. border illegally, creating challenges for the city, county and NGOs to shelter them or get them on their way. The migrants seeking asylum had crossed illegally, escaping detection by Border Patrol agents.
“I have become more and more convinced that the outcome people want is chaos on the border,” he said. “I think a lot of it depends on political questions: What is the outcome you want?”
‘Closer to the action’
At the start of the week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it would launch a “targeted law enforcement operation” Downtown in the areas where migrants had taken refuge in the streets.
Border agents showed up before dawn the next morning, not with handcuffs, but with a flyer encouraging migrants to turn themselves in at a nearby Border Patrol station. They laid the single pages printed with large type in Spanish beside sleeping men, women and children.
El Paso seemed to be teetering on the edge of confrontation, with immigrant advocates bracing for a raid they worried could end in violence.
Meanwhile, the organizers of the Border Security Expo were preparing to host 1,700 business owners and Homeland Security officials at what’s billed as the preeminent event for border security contracting — transferred to El Paso this year from San Antonio to bring participants closer to the border.
“You asked. We listened,” the expo website said. “We’re taking you closer to the action.”
Conventioneers, CBP officials and high-ranking policy leaders flew in from Washington, D.C., to a city in crisis. El Paso was one of three Border Patrol sectors fielding more than 2,000 migrant encounters per day. The sector had more than 6,000 migrants in custody.
Half a mile from the expo, hundreds of migrants were living in squalor around El Paso’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church and Opportunity Center homeless shelters, locations off limits to Border Patrol enforcement according to the agency’s historical practice of keeping a distance from sanctuaries.
Something had to be done.
CBP brought stakeholders to the table. An idea was floated to process migrants willing to turn themselves in. NGOs wanted a promise the migrants who surrendered would be released; Border Patrol was unwilling to make that guarantee.
CBP attempted to balance humanitarian and security concerns, the nation’s Border Patrol chief said.
During a break in the expo, Ortiz and El Paso Border Patrol Chief Scott Good spoke to a dozen reporters at a media roundtable in a conference room upstairs at the convention center. Immigration reporters from major television networks and national newspapers had swooped into town to cover a city expected to be at the center of the Title 42 fallout.
Good said the message to migrants was an offer, if not a promise.
“If you want services from NGOs, if you want the county to be able to help you leave El Paso, you have to have been processed,” Good said. “I can’t guarantee whether that’s going to be a removal from the United States or not. But you’re going to be homeless in El Paso, just stuck.”
Some 917 people surrendered over two days. Armed agents apprehended another 44 migrants in a second phase of the operation. A “high majority” of those who turned themselves in were being processed for release with a “Notice to Appear” at an immigration hearing, Good said.
When she woke up at the Opportunity Center homeless shelter and saw the flyer, a Venezuelan woman who gave her name as Yenine woke up her husband and young daughter.
“I said, ‘Get up! We’re going to turn ourselves in with the help of God,'” she said.
They were among the first to turn themselves in. They left with notices to appear and hearing dates.
“I am so excited because I have legal papers now,” she said. “I don’t have to be running with anxiety that they’re going to deport me.”
More: When Title 42 expires, will migrants be prosecuted for crossing border illegally?
Border security as big business
In the expo hall, dozens of curtained booths advertised products and services in law enforcement jargon. Businesses were selling “aerospace solutions,” “video and data at the tactical edge,” “purpose-built gear” and “unmanned systems,” including drones.
The expo drew vendors eager to learn what tech and services they could sell to an agency with a $175.3 billion annual budget and an increasing appetite for assistance from contractors.
The conference website introduced a panel on procurement this way: “As DHS passes its 20th year, the organization is now fully formed and focusing on integration and operation of enterprise-wide legacy systems as well as specific agency needs. It is reducing mission collaboration barriers, focusing on cyber security and biometrics, and growing a wider portfolio of acquisitions to support the mission.”
Translation: DHS is ready to do business, and technology is the future of border enforcement.
The migrants living on El Paso sidewalks inevitably said they made the risky decision to cross illegally because one of the Biden administration’s answers to recent migration patterns — technology — wasn’t working well enough.
Since January, certain migrants, including Venezuelans, have been allowed to make an appointment to present at a port of entry in a cellphone app called CBP One.
The technology couldn’t handle the demand: Nearly everyone had a story of spending days or weeks trying to make an appointment but being met each time with a glitch, the app crashing or freezing or forcing them to start over.
Tired of trying, thousands crossed the border between ports of entry, and without permission, through windows cut by smugglers in the steel border fence flood gates.
Calm after the border crisis
Title 42 was set to expire at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.
The transition to Title 8 processing was nearly complete, Ortiz said. After expelling more than two-thirds of migrants under Title 42 a few months ago, Border Patrol expelled 17% of migrants encountered on Tuesday, he said.
“I think were really past the surge,” Ortiz said.
Most of the Venezuelans who had spent nights huddled under tarps and Red Cross blankets around Sacred Heart were gone. The men cutting hair, or taking turns charging cellphones in the church, were gone. The hunger and heartbreak of children, playing with old toys on cardboard beds, were gone.
A speaker blaring the voice of El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego in the church’s back alley, informing migrants of their rights and responsibilities, had gone silent.
El Paso had been here before: the calm after the crisis, the quiet before the next.
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser gave a welcome speech at the convention in the morning. He joked that the airport would be closed until June and all the Homeland Security officials, working and retired, would have to stay and help with the crisis. The audience laughed.
That afternoon, Leeser invited reporters to Bassett Middle School. Vacant classrooms were being converted into a migrant shelter. The American Red Cross had set up 275 green cots with room for as many 1,000.
And if the Border Patrol chief’s prediction proved wrong — if more beds were needed — the convention center, now crowded with border security vendors, would be transformed into a shelter for migrants.
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@elpasotimes.com, on Twitter @laurenvillagran or on Instagram @fronteravillagran.
