A resource center that the city of San Antonio set up in the summer of 2022 to aid a wave of asylum-seeking migrants will no longer accept new arrivals starting Monday.

The city plans to phase out operations due to the “sustained and significant decline” in the number of migrants traveling through San Antonio.

In recent weeks the city has experienced about a dozen migrants arriving each day — compared to roughly 1,400 people arriving per day at the height of the crisis, City Manager Erik Walsh told reporters at a press briefing Monday.

“The number of migrants currently arriving at the MRC no longer justifies the cost of running it,” he said.

Various city estimates provided to the San Antonio Report last year indicated the facility cost between $1.2 million and $800,000 per month to run, with a lease that could last until 2032. 

A city spokesman said Monday that the city is currently spending $500,000 per month on the facility. 

The city is in the process of ending the lease, Walsh said.

Changing policy landscape

As of Monday morning just 88 migrants were at the center, most of whom were families who already had travel plans arranged, according to the city.

Thanks in part to policy changes enacted toward the end of President Joe Biden’s administration, a decrease in arrivals started in early 2024.

Since President Donald Trump took office this year, however, he’s signaled numerous policy changes that could make migration through the asylum process more complicated. 

Trump has also vowed to deport millions of people who entered the country during the previous administration and punish cities that resist his enforcement policies.

While San Antonio was a partner to the Biden administration in helping manage the large number of migrants arriving under its early policies, city leaders have also vowed to uphold their obligations to help federal law enforcement with the Trump-era policies.

Walsh said Monday that the recent changes have “affected the flow [of migrants] in San Antonio,” but the city hasn’t received direct threats from the administration about its migrant aid. 

“Obviously that’s all happening, but here locally, we haven’t experienced any of that directly,” Walsh said. “What has changed is we’re having an average of 12 people show up a day… There’s no reason why we should be spending that much money.”

When the MRC sunsets, so will the city’s ability to count the number of migrants passing through the city. It launched a dashboard to keep the public up to date on the numbers, but it will no longer be updated.

“We had a central point where we could count [people],” Walsh said of the MRC. “We’re going to leave that site up for a while. It’s good historical information… But it’ll be difficult to do that [without the MRC]. It’ll be impossible, actually.”

A political football

Still, the Migrant Resource Center — also known as Centro de Bienvenida — has been the source of much political debate at City Hall over the past two and a half years.

During the height of migrant arrivals in 2022, city leaders said it was critical that San Antonio take steps to prevent them from crowding the San Antonio International Airport, the downtown Greyhound bus station and Travis Park while they sought transportation to family and friends in other cities.

But the center’s July 2022 opening on San Pedro Avenue — in a Northside building previously occupied by CPS Energy — was handled with almost no public discussion, and came as a surprise to nearby residents.

Within months the city handed over operations of the center to Catholic Charities, which just opened a new 40,560-square foot center, the Mother Teresa Center on the Northwest side, in early November that will provide refugee services. 

Going forward, Walsh said, it will largely be up to nonprofit groups to help migrants who arrive in San Antonio.

“The relationship that we have with those nonprofits, I feel pretty confident that if anything came up… we would be better organized as a city, to work with them,” he told reporters Monday.

Though the city and Catholic Charities expected and received significant reimbursement from the federal government for the costs of running the MRC, that money has appeared less reliable throughout Congress’ recent spending fights.

As of this month, roughly $12.4 million is pending reimbursement from the federal government, according to the city.

“As the city now finds itself in a place where future funding for the MRC is in doubt, closing the MRC was the only option,” Councilman Marc Whyte (D10) said in a statement Monday.

A second migrant transit center that the city stood up near the San Antonio International Airport was shuttered in April of last year.