Non-Government Migrant Shelters (NGOs) are feeling the impact as illegal entries continue to dwindle across the southwest border after President Trump’s swift actions to control the border and carry out mass deportations. Non-profit organizations that received hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government under the Biden Administration began to close their doors.
From Texas to California, the shelters that once counted on a steady flow of cash from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Food and Shelter Program and later by FEMA and Customs and Border Protection jointly under the Shelter and Services Program are no longer receiving released asylum-seeking migrants from the Department of Homeland Security. The released migrants, now the missing part of the equation necessary to receive millions of tax-payer dollars, are causing the rapid closures of shelters in Texas and Arizona in the first few weeks of the new administration.
The latest private non-government migrant shelter to close is in San Antonio, Texas, just a few miles from the San Antonio International Airport. The Migrant Resource Center (MRC) has been run in partnership with the City of San Antonio and Catholic Charities since 2022. On Monday, city officials announced that the shelter would be closing as fewer migrants are being received.
In late January, just days after President Trump’s inauguration, two shelters closed in Pima County, Arizona. County Officials announced the closures in Tucson after the Border Patrol discontinued migrant releases immediately following the 47th President’s inauguration. The end of migrant releases in Arizona and other border regions also spelled doom for those two shelters.
The Arizona shelters, one on Drexel Road in Tucson that temporarily houses 650 migrants and another known as Casa Alitas that provides services to more than 100 migrants, had been in operation for several years during the Biden-Harris administration.
Breitbart Texas visited each of the Arizona shelters and the Migrant Resource Center in Texas several times during high migrant crossing periods. It observed a constant influx of migrants released to non-government entities. The facilities served as transportation coordination hubs that moved hundreds of thousands of migrants from the border region into the interior of the United States yearly.
According to FEMA, in Fiscal Year 2024, Congress appropriated $650 million tax-payer dollars for the Shelter and Services Program to reimburse non-government shelters in multiple border and interior cities nationwide.
The drop in illegal border crossings since the inauguration of President Trump will likely mean more shelters will shutter in the coming days and weeks. On Sunday, less than 500 migrants were apprehended crossing the southwest border, according to a source within Customs and Border Protection. In the Del Rio Sector of the United States Border Patrol, less than 25 migrants were apprehended making landfall on the banks of the Rio Grande on that day, a far cry from thousands of migrants crossing illegally in that region on several days during December 2023.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @RandyClarkBBTX.
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