San Antonio leaders have long championed a “compassionate” approach to dealing with the roughly 600,000 asylum-seeking migrants that have arrived in the city since 2021.
Key to the success of that plan, however, has been the temporary nature of migrants’ presence in the city. Federal grant money used to help transport migrants on to their final destinations is now drying up, and members of Congress appear unable to reach an agreement on federal spending bills that would provide additional money.
Catholic Charities, which operates two locations that provide migrants a temporary stopping place, told the San Antonio Report on Thursday that it has begun relying on private donors to provide plane tickets and bus fares for migrants who arrive without the means to continue their journey.
Facing a future in which migrants could be stalled in San Antonio, the first major transit hub from the border, Mayor Ron Nirenberg canceled a City Council meeting Thursday to join other South Texas mayors in a meeting with President Joe Biden in Brownsville.
Like San Antonio, Brownsville operates a migrant resource facility intended to serve as a transit center, and Nirenberg’s office said the mayors used the 30-minute meeting to make the case for more resources to keep migrants moving through their cities.
“Our charge has been to maintain order, to protect public safety, and to treat people with basic dignity and compassion,” Nirenberg said Wednesday of San Antonio’s efforts. “We’ve been able to do that because of the support provided by the Department of Homeland Security and the federal government.”
San Antonio opened its Migrant Resource Center in 2022 to keep migrants off the streets while they await flights or buses to take them on to friends and families in other cities. The Biden administration has lauded the facility as a model for other cities struggling with an influx of migrants, but the city relies almost entirely on federal grants to run it.
Catholic Charities received its last tranche of federal funding in January. Along with the San Antonio Food Bank, it was among numerous nonprofits across the country competing for a pool of money Congress intended to cover the 2023 fiscal year.
On Tuesday, Nirenberg said he huddled with local providers of homeless services and confirmed that migrants haven’t yet been funneling into their pipeline, as Catholic Charities CEO Antonio Fernandez predicted in December.
That situation could quickly change, however, if the currently low number of daily arrivals rises again, Nirenberg said.
Congress faces two spending deadlines over the next several days that could result in a full or partial government shutdown, impacting pay for Border Patrol agents as well as delaying any federal resources the city could receive to continue its migrant aid.
“It’s only a matter of time before … we’re staring at another political crisis being created by Congress,” Nirenberg said Wednesday.
Political tug-of-war
While local officials were seeking help from federal leaders, national Democrats and Republicans were in Texas on a different mission Thursday.
Flanked by fellow party leaders at highly publicized gatherings roughly 300 miles apart along the Texas-Mexico border, both Biden and former President Donald Trump jockeyed to advance their political narratives about the border ahead of a contentious 2024 presidential election.
In Brownsville, Democrats seized the opportunity to use a failed bipartisan border security bill against Republicans who desperately want tougher border measures, painting them as a party controlled by Trump’s political whim.
Biden had asked Congress to come up with legislation that would allow him to close the border when the number of migrant crossings become too high in a single week, as well as provide money for additional immigration judges at the border.
But that package, negotiated in part by U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-San Antonio), fell flat after Trump told members of his party to wait on a solution until after the presidential election.
“I want the people to understand clearly what happened,” Biden said in Brownsville on Thursday. “This bill was in the United States Senate, on its way to being passed, and it was derailed by partisan politics.”
“The majority of Democrats and Republicans in both houses supported this legislation until someone came along and said, ‘Don’t do that, it’ll benefit the incumbent,” he added. “That’s a hell of a way to do business in America for such a serious problem.”
Democrats feel so confident in that argument, they have already launched ads saying, “Trump doesn’t care about securing the border, he only cares about himself.”
A different message
Republicans, meanwhile, were in Eagle Pass, telling their supporters that Biden never needed legislation to secure the border in the first place and has actively thwarted GOP border security methods that work.
Texas’ Republican leaders have sought to circumvent the federal government’s authority on the issue by putting up their own physical barriers at the border and approving a new law to make crossing the border illegally a state crime local officers can enforce.
In January the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in allowing it to remove Texas’ razor wire barriers, and the new state law, known as Senate Bill 4, was blocked by a federal judge Thursday.
That hasn’t stopped Gov. Greg Abbott, Trump and other Republicans who were at the border Thursday surveying other state efforts to continue the border policies employed by Trump’s administration even after losing the White House. Keeping those efforts going at any cost is a top priority among many of the former president’s supporters.
In an nod to that dynamic, Abbott told Republicans at a campaign event in San Antonio Wednesday that despite the Supreme Court’s razor wire ruling, he asked the National Guard to “not just double down, but triple-strand” it at the border — a comment that drew cheers from the GOP activists.
In Washington, D.C., however, the question of how far Republicans should take their pursuit of border security measures has been far more contentious.
Republicans took control of the House in 2023, and a majority of them have joined Democrats in supporting short-term spending bills to keep the government running.
A smaller cadre of conservatives wants to hold government funding ransom for more border security, and was able to oust the party’s first speaker, Kevin McCarthy, for not doing so.
The party went three weeks without a leader before Johnson was selected to replace him.
Since then, he has also taken heat from conservatives for approving a short-term funding bill that avoided a shutdown last year, and it’s unclear what future he might have in the party if he does so again.
Raquel Torres contributed to this report.
