Mayor of California border town says soon thousands of migrants will flood the streets and 'destroy businesses' as overwhelmed shelters buckle under crisis
By Joe Hutchison For Dailymail.Com,
2024-02-23
A California mayor fears migrants will end up flooding the streets of his town due to a nearby migrant center went bust after just five months.
Non-profit SBCS, closed their doors on Thursday after squandering $6 million in taxpayers money in just a few months.
The migrant center, formerly known as South Bay Community Services, said the number of people needing help in that time 'increased significantly'.
The center, located in Chula Vista, had been taking in those crossing over the San Diego border, which in the last five months has totaled over 100,000.
The mayor of nearby El Cajon, Bill Wells has now told Fox News that he fears the closure will create a 'serious problem' for his community.
'A lot of those have been absorbed by this county shelter that used taxpayer money.
'They asked for $3 million and they spent over $6 million and now they say they're out of money. So we're going to see migrants congregating in our streets.
'At the same time this is happening, border patrol tells us we are going to go from 300 drop offs a day, to a 1000 drop offs a day.
'I think it's going to become a pretty serious problem pretty quickly. They spend up to $8,000 per person per month to put someone up in a hotel.
'It ruins the neighborhoods, it destroys the hotels, it destroys our security infrastructure and it is really bad for everybody.'
In announcing the closure of the center, CEO Kathie Lembo said: 'As the number of migrants arriving at the center has increased significantly over the last few weeks, our finite resources have been stretched to the limit, leading to the closure of the center on February 22.
'When we accepted the challenge of this work in October of last year, we knew two things: that it spoke to the heart of our mission, and that it was for a limited time.'
Speaking on the $6 million that the center burned through, Lembo added: 'With the receipt of that money there was expectations that it would be used until the end of March, so ending a month early does raise concerns and questions for me.'
US Customs and Border Protection has recorded 21,000 encounters with Chinese nationals in the San Diego Sector since the fiscal year began in October, according to CBP data obtained by Fox News that is not yet public.
That's more than the 18,700 encounters with Mexican nationals during the same period, and second only to the 28,000 Columbians CBP reported encountering in the sector.
Speaking on the number of Chinese migrants at the border, Wells added: 'I went down to the border recently and came across an encampment of people and everyone of them was a Chinese migrant, that is a real serious concern.
'It makes me nervous to see enemies of our nation congregating right in our city, we have no idea how many are in El Cajon.'
Chief Patrol Agent Anthony Good, of the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, said last year that his agents were 'trying their best to figure out why [individuals from other continents are] coming' but that 'information can be hidden' and 'their agendas, their ideologies, the reason for them coming could be missed'.
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