SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — The Iris Avenue Trolley Station is once again a makeshift operation to help migrants get to the next stop on their journeys. You can see here behind me volunteers have set up shop and are welcoming in hundreds of migrants who were released here by border patrol agents.
One by one migrants exit a bus to start the first day of their journeys in the United States.
But for the first time in about two weeks, in the south bay, their first stop is Iris Avenue.
"The journey started September 15. I had to leave because there was some trouble going on back home," said
Salieu Jalioh is from West Africa but is headed to New York.
Volunteers let him know there would be a shuttle to the airport every two hours.
"It's not going to be easy. I mean you have to go through immigration and paperwork and [it's] a waiting game again, but I'm looking forward to it," said
If Salieu had been released 12 hours before- he probably would've been dropped off at Casa Familiar's day shelter.
It's empty today because the non-profit's CEO Lisa Cuestas said it stopped operations because they were no longer sustainable funding or staffing-wise.
"When you do too many 16-hour days and you see what it does to yourself and to other volunteers and to other staff. That's the part of where if you drain yourself too much to the point where you're not able to help that's part of why we're shifting our model," said Jalioh.
She said the price tag was thousands of dollars.
"Of the numbers, we've been able to figure out. I know it's going to be more. It was less than two weeks and we had spent $200,000," said Cuestas.
Casa Familiar helped about eight thousand migrants at the day shelter.
So, if we do the math.
That's roughly $25 per migrant.
"We were paying for security, paying for porta potties. Imagine the cleaning and the additional trash services. Imagine the staffing," she said.
Cuestas said behind the work and expenses were people.
"They are people. We are people. It's not politics. It's people," she said.
She said running the shelter took a lot of heart.
She thinks the solution is for the county to step in and come up with a plan.
"The repercussions of not doing anything swiftly is going to end up impacting every single district eventually. Unfortunately, districts like ours are feeling it first. It's not the first time, we saw it during COVID-19 and it seems like we're not learning anything since covid or the first time this was very real in 2018," she said.
