As winds whipped through the campsite under a gloomy afternoon sky, about a dozen people from countries around the world huddled near a small fire trying to stay warm and keep the flames burning. As they passed around a loaf of bread, each taking a slice, the howling wind threatened to carry away the small pink tents that dotted the camp.
Just a few hundred feet away, semi-trucks barreled past on Interstate 8. Tent Camping Sites
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The brightly colored tents once belonged to the breast-cancer organization Susan G. Komen for the Cure, but this camp is not part of that organization’s signature three-day, 60-mile fundraising walk. Instead, the tents — rescued from a dumpster and upcycled by activists — are sheltering migrants, many of them asylum seekers, who recently arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Set up on a patch of desert land just south of I-8 near Jacumba Hot Springs and the Valley of the Moon wilderness area, the pink tents have offered the most public view yet of a worsening humanitarian situation that’s been simmering for nearly three months along the San Diego County border with Mexico. What travelers see as they pass the In-Ko-Pah Park Road exit off I-8 is one of three makeshift migrant camps in the East County wilderness, but the only one visible from a paved road or heavily trafficked area.
For months now, since at least mid-September, migrants have been crossing the border in large groups in the Jacumba and Boulevard areas and surrendering to Border Patrol agents. As they wait for agents to transport them to processing facilities, the migrants must wait in the camps, sometimes for hours and sometimes for nearly a week, but usually for a few days. Immigrant rights groups describe the camps, which Border Patrol surveils but does not operate, as open-air detention sites and call them “inhumane,” since Border Patrol provides no shelter and little food or water but detains those who might try to leave.
On Wednesday afternoon at the camp near the freeway, about 50 migrants from Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia and Turkey, among other nations, stood around the fire or lounged inside of the pink tents and other makeshift shelters. Others wandered around the nearby desert landscape, seeking shelter from the wind behind a massive boulder. They wore wrist bands inscribed with the date they arrived, which is how Border Patrol agents — when they do come to transport them to processing facilities — know who to take first.
Nonprofit groups continue to seek resources to help migrants who are arriving at the border in San Diego County and are later being dropped off at transit centers by Border Patrol
Four other similar sites are located near the San Ysidro Port of Entry, in between two layers of border fences on U.S. soil, though fewer people have been arriving at those locations in recent weeks since the October death of a 29-year-old Guinean woman at one of the camps, according to Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit legal and humanitarian aid organization.
But the flow of people to the East County sites roughly 50 miles from San Diego has not slowed since migrants began showing up in those areas in mid-September, according to Pinheiro, who estimated that an average of 400 to 500 people, and sometimes as many as 800, are living each day at the three East County sites.
Migrants first began gathering in the area after crossing the border in May, when the Biden administration ended Title 42, a policy implemented during the pandemic that allowed migrants at the southern border to be quickly expelled without a chance to ask for asylum. The East County crossings slowed down during the summer’s hottest months, but picked back up in September, according Pinheiro. There was ice on the ground Wednesday when she visited the camp close to the freeway, and she fears migrants may die in the coming weeks as winter approaches and overnight temperatures in the high desert camps continue to plummet.
“People are suffering from exposure at this point,” said Samuel Schultz, a Jacumba Hot Springs resident who, along with his family, has been helping to feed and care for the migrants daily.
Border Patrol agents do not feed or care for the migrants, nor do any government entities, though San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors voted in October to allocate $3 million for migrant services for people after they are processed by Border Patrol and released into the county. Caring for the migrants at the camps before they are processed has fallen to organizations such as Al Otro Lado, Border Kindness, Universidad Popular, the American Friends Service Committee and various community-led mutual aid groups, as well as volunteers from the Jacumba community such as Schultz.
The nonprofit groups are spending thousands of dollars each day, raised through donations and philanthropic funding, to supply food, water and medical care to the migrants, Pinheiro said.
CBP no longer allows migrants to freely walk up to ports of entry and seek asylum. Instead, asylum seekers must make an appointment through the CBP One app to get an asylum screening. But that’s easier said than done. Demand is high for the limited number of appointments offered each day, users say the app is riddled with flaws and it’s only available in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
Migrants who don’t know about the app, can’t use it because of language barriers or are unable to get an appointment have largely chosen to surrender between ports of entry instead.
Pinheiro said that short of allowing asylum claims at ports of entry, the second best option would be for CBP to set up a temporary facility — such as the soft-sided tent processing facility CBP erected earlier this year near Brown Field in Otay Mesa — to shelter migrants during processing.
“For those who do cross, it’s absolutely imperative that they be brought indoors,” Pinheiro said Thursday, noting that Border Patrol has dealt with similar immigration situations in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso sectors by erecting the large, soft-sided tents. “We’re on day 81 of these camps — it’s surprising to me those resources have not been allocated.”
In a statement, a CBP spokesperson said the agency is “leveraging all available resources and partnerships to efficiently vet and process migrants consistent with law” but blamed the situation on smuggling groups south of the border.
“(CBP) continues to surge personnel, transportation, processing, and humanitarian resources to the most active and arduous areas throughout San Diego’s border region where migrants are callously placed by for-profit smuggling organizations, often without proper preparation,” the spokesperson said.
Pinheiro said that at “bare minimum, Border Patrol should be providing food, water and medical care. The fact that that’s not happening is really inhumane. And it’s a huge burden on our groups.”
CBP officials say they provide medical care and humanitarian assistance as needed and regularly coordinate emergency medical help for those in need. Agency officials say their goal is to quickly transport migrants to CBP processing facilities, where they are screened and placed into removal proceedings.
In the meantime, the volunteers and nonprofits are taking it upon themselves to care for the recent arrivals, with Pinheiro praising Schultz’s efforts. “I don’t know what we would have done without him and his family,” she said.
The camp visible from the freeway is the one most exposed to the elements, without the large bushes that migrants at the other locations have used for shelter. Until a few weeks ago, there was little shade or protection from the wind. Then a retiree who lives in the area showed up one day to construct several tepee-style shelters from tarps, Pinheiro said. And volunteers brought the pink tents the week of Thanksgiving. Some of those same volunteers returned Wednesday to build two yurts.
How long the small tents can survive the harsh high desert conditions remains to be seen. On Wednesday afternoon, the strong winds scattered debris around the desert while threatening to dislodge and blow away the shelters.
Schultz said Friday morning that weather conditions the previous few days had “been horrible,” with nighttime temperatures dropping 25 to 30 degrees below daytime highs, into the 30s.
Among the men and women huddled around the fire Wednesday was a tall Afghan who said he worked for 11 years as a diplomat in Afghanistan’s embassy in India. The man, who asked for anonymity because he feared retribution from the Taliban, said he and others from the embassy fled last month after refusing to represent the Taliban. They flew from India to Mexico City and then Tijuana before arriving at the desert camp. It’s located just a few hundred yards north of a large gap in the border wall, in the area where I-8 dips closest to the border before curving northward and dropping into Imperial County.
The man said the Taliban, who he described as a “militant terrorist group,” had pressured him and his colleagues at the embassy to represent its interests. He said he could not do that in good conscience.
“We stand for freedom, values, human rights, women’s rights and justice,” he said. He believed that if he would have returned to Afghanistan after refusing to work for the Taliban, he would have been “killed, or persecuted forever.”
The diplomat and his colleagues had attempted to secure U.S. visas, but when that was not possible, they decided to head to Mexico first and then to the border. Having arrived that morning, he wore a jacket with the hood tightly drawn around his face, which dropped when he learned he might have to wait days in the camp before being processed.
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