After months wondering whether funding is on the way to cover operations at San Antonio’s Migrant Resource Center, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Friday it will grant $38 million to assist San Antonio’s humanitarian response to Title 42 ending.
Of the newly announced $38 million from the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, Catholic Charities will receive $31,955,232 toward continuing operations at the MRC, the City of San Antonio will get $4,692,492, and $1,584,931 will go to the United Way of San Antonio.
The announcement came from Democratic U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro and Greg Casar’s offices, shortly after U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo) held a press conference at Catholic Charities’ headquarters near Tobin Hill to highlight the challenges border cities and San Antonio face following the end of Title 42 on May 11.
“Remember, what you’re seeing here in San Antonio … multiply that by several times, [is] what we see at the border,” said Cuellar, standing next to Catholic Charities’ CEO Antonio Fernandez. “My biggest concern is the impact that it has on the border and other communities, because there are large numbers of people coming in.”
On Friday morning, the City of San Antonio said the MRC is already “over capacity,” and that the number of migrants at the MRC and at the San Antonio International Airport has quadrupled over the past week, and the numbers are only expected to grow.
Catholic Charities, which manages the MRC locally in partnership with the City of San Antonio, was in limbo for months with uncertainty about whether federal funding was coming, Fernandez explained. Up until Friday’s announcement, Catholic Charities had paused on creating a plan ahead of the end of Title 42, he said.
Even with the new funding, standing up a second location of the MRC — also known as the Centro de Bienvenida — is not possible in the near future, Fernandez told the San Antonio Report. For now, Catholic Charities will send migrants they can’t accommodate to local hotels to contain the overflow, since the MRC only has 690 beds.
In a recent interview, Fernandez said another way the government could help local nonprofits would be by helping transport migrants directly from the border to their host cities.
“I can tell you, without helping people get to their final destinations, it’s going to be a very critical issue,” Fernandez said.
Cuellar said he did not agree federal funding should be used to transport migrants to their destinations, but Fernandez said that if Catholic Charities doesn’t pay for migrants’ travel, the situation in San Antonio would be a lot worse.
Just below Cuellar’s press conference, the building’s lobby was full of migrant families seeking assistance from Catholic Charities. None of them seemed to know what was going on at the press conference one floor above, but they watched Cuellar and others leave the building as they clutched paperwork and listened for their names to be called from the front desk.
Iliana Mendez, a 25-year-old Cuban immigrant, sat with her sister-in-law and her nephew. She was waiting for an appointment to receive assistance from Catholic Charities, which she said has helped her cover living costs before.
Mendez said she migrated from Cuba due to political turmoil that limited access to general life necessities like food, medicine and transportation.
“Us immigrants, sometimes, we’re very discriminated [against]. People think we come to do bad things. A lot of us come because of political issues, but that doesn’t give a reason not to talk to us or not to look at us. We’re the same as any other person that lives in this country,” Mendez said.
“We’re human. Why not confront us? We just come asking for help, asylum, refuge.”
