As thousands of Central Americans continue their northward journeys through Mexico, the prospect of their eventual arrival at the U.S. border has been raising concerns in Tijuana.

Shelter capacity in the city is limited, and several facilities already are overcrowded with women and children preparing to petition U.S. authorities for asylum.

An existing wait list has swelled to more than 2,500 people, and reaching the front of the line can take as long as six weeks. U.S. officials at the San Ysidro Port of Entry might process 30 or even 60 from the line in a day. Some days they might not take any, according to the migrants who are waiting to be accepted for processing.

With at least three migrant caravans now making their way north — the third group of more than 1,000 Salvadorans waded over the Suchiate River from Guatemala on Friday— the issue has become increasingly urgent at the country’s northern border, prompting meetings to develop contingency plans of how Tijuana and Baja California would cope with the presence of thousands of Central American migrants in the city for an indefinite period.


“No city in the world is ready to respond to a group of 6,000 to 7,000 people who arrive all at once,” said César Palencia, head of the office of migrant affairs at Tijuana City Hall. “That is our biggest concern, that the federal government won’t do anything and in the end, it will be municipalities and the state who end up having to offer support.”

The three caravans stretched across the southern Mexican states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz, together totaling more than 6,000 migrants.

Still, there remains much uncertainty as to when, where and how many of those migrants currently in transit will finally make it to the U.S. border, and if Tijuana will even be a destination. Last spring, a Central American caravan swelled to 1,500 in southern Mexico ended up with only about 300 in Tijuana, with some 250 of those applying for asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

Father Pat Murphy, director of the Casa del Migrante, poses for a photo with an image of John Baptist Scalabrini, founder of the Scalabrinian missionaries. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune)


Many of the shelters poised to provide assistance to these new caravan members are already offering shelter to an existing flow of Central Americans and Mexicans seeking asylum in the United States — but also to sizable numbers of Mexicans deported from the United States.

As they envision scenarios with the current caravans, migrant advocates in the city fear repeating the experience of 2016, when the city was flooded with thousands of Haitians who had made their way to the Port of Entry in hopes of entering the United States. The sudden and unexpected influx not only overwhelmed the capacity of U.S. authorities to process their asylum petitions; they flooded Tijuana’s migrant shelters, and evangelical groups stepped up to offer their facilities to house the overflow.

Should large numbers of Central Americans arrive, “we don’t have enough space,” said Claudia Portela, coordinator at the Desayunador Padre Chava, a soup kitchen and 40-bed men’s shelter near the U.S. border. “When the Haitians came, there was a lot of solidarity, but there were also people who ended up sleeping in the street,” she said.

“It’s like 2016 all over again,” said the Rev. Patrick Murphy, director of the Casa del Migrante, a 150-bed shelter for migrant men run by Catholic missionaries of the Scalabrinian order. “My biggest fear is that the federal government won’t respond, that they’ll have a million excuses.”


In Baja California, federal, state, and local officials have been meeting with shelter operators in recent weeks to come up with a plan. “We’re meeting, and that’s good, we’ve had a lot more meetings than before the Haitians came,” Murphy said. “But I don’t see a lot of evidence that they’re super ready.”

Marcela Celorio, Mexico’s consul general in San Diego, has been following developments closely as part of a group of government officials, shelter representatives and human rights advocates at the border. Compared with other border cities in northern Mexico, Tijuana has far greater capacity to assist migrants, she said. And among the three levels of government, “there is this commitment to coordinate and respond in an effective way.”

Some are even seeing potential benefits if large numbers of Central Americans come to the border. The city’s booming maquiladora industry has thousands of openings that they might fill, one industry leader said. But for that to happen, they would first need Mexico’s federal government to grant them legal resident status and work permits.

The caravans of Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries come at a sensitive moment in Mexico, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador prepares to assume Mexico’s presidency on Dec. 1.


The phenomenon has become a hot-button issue in the United States just as voters prepare for mid-term elections on Tuesday.

As he seeks support for Republican candidates, President Donald Trump repeatedly has brought up the issue of the Central American migrants. Though caravan leaders say their plan is to go to ports of entry and ask for asylum, which would not break any U.S. laws, the president has sent thousands of military personnel to the border and vowed to build tent cities to hold them as they await hearings.

A statement sent out by a network of 30 migrant shelters and human rights centers in northern Mexico warns that those arriving in border cities face not only long waits to be processed at U.S. ports of entry, but insufficient shelter space, and limited facilities for children. It also cautions against sleeping in the streets, due to cooling temperatures, and warns of the presence of organized crime members and occasional corrupt police officials who can prey on migrants.

But neither the shelters’ warnings nor President Trump’s statements so far have deterred those who say they are desperate for safe haven. On Wednesday morning, a crowd of dozens of people clustered by the San Ysidro Port of Entry around a woman with a beat-up, gray notebook that has been used by migrants for months to track who’s next to request asylum.


As she announced the numbers of those who would be allowed in, several stepped forward with identification documents to verify their places in line. A Mexican immigration official then led them toward the U.S. port. A mother and father, grinning that it was finally their turn, carried a large duffel bag between them, their children scurrying to keep pace in their excitement to enter.

Tijuana has a dozen shelters operated by churches and nonprofit groups that assist migrants, and among them have no more than 1,400 beds, according to the city’s migrant office. They have been especially hard pressed in recent months to offer space to the large numbers of women and children from Central America and southern Mexico.

Honduran Dany Rigoberto Alvarado, 35, visits his family at the Centro Madre Assunta, a shelter for women and children in Tijuana, on Wednesday. From left: Elsa Marina Pineda (wife), Manuel Alvarado,11, Josue Alvarado, 8, Brian Alvarado (back), 15, and Dany Alvarado, 13. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune)

One shelter, the Centro Madre Assunta, built to hold 42 women and children, was housing 110 at the end of last week. In the city’s Zona Norte, another shelter, Movimiento Juventud 2000, was also over its 100-person capacity capacity last week, with 160 people, almost all mothers with children, crammed into small tents placed on the floor of a common room.


Carmen Zendejas, 28, said crime in the town of Tuxpan, Michoacan, prompted her and her farmworker husband to flee with their three daughters, ages 4 to 11.

“There have been many kidnappings in the schools, and we’d get phone calls from people trying to frighten and extort us,” she said one day last week, still weeks away from an asylum interview. She said she hoped to make it to the United States, “to work, bring up our children, nothing more.”

Outside the Centro Madre Assunta, Dany Rigoberto Alvarado, a 35-year-old electrician from Honduras, stood separated by a fence with his wife and four boys.

“We’ve suffered very much to get this far,” said Alvarado, who said he had been targeted by opponents of the country’s ruling party, and gang members had begun pressuring his eldest child to join them and wear their tattoos. He fears his enemies could reach him in Mexico, he said, and won’t feel safe until he has reached the United States.


The Associated Press contributed to this report.

sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com

@sandradibble