This is part of a series of stories about people seeking asylum or refuge in Southern Arizona and the complex, chaotic U.S. immigration system at the center of a humanitarian crisis. Read them all here.
Small purple butterflies are stenciled on the white walls of the office where Diego Lopez, director of Casa Alitas Welcome Center, shifts between multiple conversations and the near constant ping of his cellphone.
Except for a few decorative flairs and the smiling faces of staff and volunteers, Casa Alitas is all about efficiency: meeting the basic needs of the hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand, migrant men, women and children who pass through its doors every day.
As recently as 2019, Lopez was the only paid staffer. That was back when Casa Alitas was based in an old house in central Tucson and they served about 30 people a day — at most.
“I started this work 10 years ago, sharing meals with people in a house,” Lopez said.
The situation has changed. Now, Lopez directs a staff of between 40 and 50 (the numbers fluctuate frequently, depending on need) and a volunteer corps of almost 900 people. Casa Alitas runs out of five locations, sometimes more, and is centered in a large warehouse with an enormous main room and dozens of other large spaces, including a kitchen, various medical units, multiple intake and departure units, and a refrigerated semi-truck trailer outside to store extra food.
On any given day there could be between 500 or 600 migrants — who have traveled from across the globe, some as far as Russia and Asia, others from neighboring Latin America — in line by 9 a.m.
In 2019, Pima County, partnering with Casa Alitas, responded to slightly more than 18,000 asylum-seekers, according to a county report shared with Arizona Luminaria. In 2022, that number jumped to more than 85,000. In 2023, it was more than 195,000 — an increase of greater than 1,000% in four years.
Managing the complex logistics and meeting the many needs — from delivering food to helping make calls to dealing with illness or missing family members, among myriad other issues — costs a lot of money.
Weekly operational costs rose in the last months of 2023 to as much as $400,000 dollars a week. Since 2019, the county has received about $65 million dollars in federal funds, much of it coming from the Emergency Food and Shelter Program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The state of Arizona provides additional funding.
But now almost all of that funding is due to be cut off. County, city and state officials have seen the writing on the wall. Casa Alitas has issued notices to most of its employees that as many as 30 of them will likely be let go, according to county officials and an internal memo that was delivered to the staff and shared with Arizona Luminaria. And county officials, at the Feb. 20 board of supervisors meeting, discussed possibly selling the nonprofit’s main facility on West Drexel Road in southwest Tucson.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and Pima County Board of Supervisors Chair Adelita Grijalva wrote in a Jan. 7 joint op-ed that the lack of federal funding will result in a “humanitarian crisis.”
“We have proven that local agencies can manage and prevent the harmful effects of federal immigration policy if Congress provides the funding,” Romero and Grijalva wrote.
Arizona Senators Mark Kelly, a Democrat, and Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, co-signed a Jan. 10 letter to the Emergency Food and Shelter Program National Board urging them to continue funding the county’s efforts to shelter and orientate asylum-seekers. The Senate leaders stressed that the Tucson Sector has “become the busiest Southwest Border sector surpassing all others,” seeing a higher number of migrants by comparison since June of 2023.
In November 2023, the Tucson Sector saw 50% more migrants — 64,638 — compared to the next busiest sector, Del Rio in Texas, which saw 21,686 fewer migrants. That trend has continued, they said, resulting in the critical demand for services from the Pima County managed Southwest Border Coalition. The coalition serves Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties, coordinating logistics and resources within a 262-mile area and helping to ensure transportation and sheltering doesn’t overburden small rural communities along the U.S.-México border.
“The crisis on Arizona’s border is not merely a matter of numbers but also of geography that makes humanitarian services complex and costly,” Kelly and Sinema wrote.
On Jan. 12, Pima County issued a press release announcing that the Emergency Food and Shelter Program had granted additional funding, $5.2 million. Officials warn that funding isn’t enough. Without federal support, funding to prevent a humanitarian crisis will run out by the end of March.
“This is a federal problem that requires a federal solution,” Dr. Francisco García, deputy county administrator for Pima County, told Arizona Luminaria. García has been leading the county’s response to the influx of people seeking asylum since 2019.
Local officials say the looming reality of lost funding will result in Border Patrol dropping off hundreds of people from countries across the world onto Tucson streets without provisions or plans to help them find shelter, meals, or move on to their next destination. It also could flood rural Arizona border communities like Douglas, Bisbee and Naco — towns with populations of less than 20,000.
“What gets lost is that regardless of whether Pima has a contract from the federal government or has worked with our partners to create some infrastructure,” García said, “these people will be released.”
“We can either have chaos or we can do our very best — that these people move efficiently to their final destination. It is in nobody’s interest to have people stuck here,” García said.
The winding road to Casa Alitas
Currently, many people seeking asylum crossing the border into Southern Arizona, whether at a port of entry or through gaps in the wall, are quickly released. But most not directly to the streets.
Pima County has been using federal funds and scrambling over the past years to: keep a roof over asylum-seekers’ heads for a day or two, let them catch their breath, eat a meal, and connect with loved ones before they move on and await their first appearance in court.
Partnering with Casa Alitas, the shelter run by Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona, Pima County has been frequently processing more than a thousand asylum-seekers a day over the last few months. The Tucson shelter is one of two overnight sites in the Southwest Border Coalition’s service area, which also includes a patchwork of hotel rooms to address public health concerns.
According to migrants and immigration experts, when a person crosses the border somewhere west of Douglas and somewhere east of Lukeville, Border Patrol agents arrest them, briefly screen and register them — usually keeping them in a short-term holding facility for one to two nights. Then they are bused to one of three places: the shelters in Tucson run by Casa Alitas, detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, or to other Border Patrol stations.
Tucson sector Border Patrol agents have also begun busing some adults to Border Patrol stations in either Yuma or El Paso, John Modlin, chief patrol agent of the Tucson Sector of Border Patrol, told Arizona Luminaria in a Feb. 26 interview. It’s a strategy that was rarely used before numbers of people seeking asylum spiked over the past year.
“We’re sending a lot of people East and West to Yuma and to El Paso, to other sectors, so that their fear claims can be heard while they remain in custody,” Modlin said.
For migrant men, women and children who are not kept in custody but are released and given future court dates, most of them end up at Casa Alitas.
Warehouse turned welcome center
Migrants arriving to Casa Alitas are first taken to an intake room — separate ones for single people and families. These are the rooms where “people can decompress and tell us what they need,” said Lopez, the director. He described various new, and constantly changing challenges presented by a shifting population.
According to data from Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan migration analysis organization, as recently as 2020, almost 90% of migrants apprehended at the U.S. Mexican border were from México, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras. In 2023, less than 50% were from those same three countries. Migrants were now arriving from South America, the Caribbean, different countries in Africa and Asia, as well as Russia and Ukraine.
Lopez gave a couple examples of people who said because of their religion they could eat meat but not pork, or others for whom it was important to wash their feet as well as their hands. Understanding, respecting, and meeting these diverse needs is not easy, Lopez said, especially as, in some cases, as soon as staff figure out how best to respond, the needs may have already changed.
Other challenges come from the outside, including “the dynamics of being a focal point of political tension, the level of scrutiny we feel about every little thing,” Lopez said. “We’re under such a microscope that I have to be scared for our safety, for our dignity as a nonprofit.”
The current pressing challenge making local and national headlines stretches beyond his local staff in Tucson to congressional leaders in Washington, D.C. and is out of his hands. “I don’t know if I have funding two or three months from now,” Lopez said.
Still, each day, he walks past the small purple butterflies stenciled on the white walls of his office and joins a team working to help people in crisis feel safe.
“I know we’re doing it for all the right reasons,” he said.
As Lopez marched through the vast warehouse last December, weaving among volunteers and asylum-seekers, snippets of Spanish and African French could be heard, along with the occasional chirruping from walkie-talkies worn on staff-members’ belts: “Bus dropping off 25 families” or “45 people coming on in on a bus.”
In an intake room, about 100 people were sitting on chairs or standing or hovering or squatting on the heel-thinned office carpet and under mismatched fluorescent lights. Almost everybody was on a phone, and many had children on their laps, in their arms or by their sides. Next door was the departure room, lined with shelves of diapers, toys, travel kits and sacks of snacks.
Across the way what looks like a pharmacy stands next to a series of medical rooms. And then a staging area lined with snaking room dividers opposite a many-thousand-square foot low-ceilinged hall resembling a field hospital with hundreds of cots lined up for families to sleep. About 60 families clustered in their own groups were resting with blankets and their belongings sprawled around them. One man in a gray hoodie pulled completely over his face was lying on a cot marked with a Red Cross sign.
Last night, Lopez said, a few hundred people, all families, slept in that massive room.
Some of the needs Casa Alitas meets are basic. Lopez said one of the very first things volunteers ask migrants is when was the last time someone has eaten. And one of the very last things they do before ushering a migrant onto a bus heading to the airport or up to Phoenix is to hand over a tightly-rolled paper bag containing new underwear, socks, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. They also give them snack packs.
“These people have been traveling for days, sometimes more,” Lopez said, underscoring how they try to maintain or restore basic dignity. While meeting such a goal for up to 1,800 people a day is an incredible challenge, Lopez doesn’t want to have to come to the point where they’re going to go to the county and say, “We’re tapping out.”
“What drives me,” Lopez said, “is that this population is the most vulnerable and disenfranchised there is, and if we can meet their needs, and make things a little better for them, then can’t we do it for anybody?”
Michael Mele has been working at the shelter for about a year and is currently the volunteer coordinator overseeing nearly 900 volunteers. He leaned back from his computer to imagine a Tucson without Casa Alitas.
Imagine 1,500 people a day, Mele said, without a welcome center or a place to stay, without a quick meal, how are they going to manage? And then 1,500 more the next day, and then the next after that.
“So they’re on their streets, they’re desperate, and what we’ve got is essentially a massive homeless population growing by thousands of people a day,” Mele said. “It would be overwhelming.”
He said Casa Alitas, in coordination with the county and funded by the federal government, is “shouldering all that,” and keeping order.
“A lot of the people in the surrounding communities maybe should recognize that as they consider what Casa Alitas is and what we do and whether or not we are a value to the local communities,” he said.
A walkie-talkie blurted out another message and another volunteer leaned their head into the room to ask Lopez a question. He nodded to the volunteer, signaling he would address whatever need had arisen but wanted to drive home what Mele had been saying.
“Without federal funds, the burden is just going to fall somewhere else on the community,” he said. “The work still needs to be done.” Lopez runs to take on the latest calling.
Waiting at the bus station for what’s next
While the work of Casa Alitas has kept people from being released to the streets, the sheer numbers in a broken immigration system means some people slip through the cracks.
A family of four, including a 6-year-old and a 16-year-old girl, along with their mother and grandmother, were released from Casa Alitas in early December to catch a bus. When they arrived at Greyhound’s Tucson Bus Station, they realized the last bus to Dallas had already left. They had nowhere to stay.
The station would close at 11:30 p.m. that night and open again early the next morning. The mom and grandma were calculating whether or not to stump for a hotel with their dwindling cash, or find somewhere outside to hunker and wait out the night.
For many people who have recently crossed the border, modern accessories like phones and phone chargers have become modern necessities. The family’s single charger was broken, but another migrant family waiting for another bus let them use theirs. They contacted Casa Alitas, but it remained uncertain if an aid worker could come.
Also at the Greyhound Station were Refugio and Navidad, brothers from Guerrero, México, who were traveling with a friend. They, too, had just been released from Casa Alitas and would soon be catching a bus to Utah. They spoke to Arizona Luminaria over chicken tacos at a fast food restaurant a few steps from the station.
“We’re thankful for all the people; for all they’ve done for us,” Refugio said in Spanish. “Even the border agent was respectful.”
About a decade ago, when the Greyhound bus station was just west of downtown, Border Patrol agents used to drop migrants off there at odd hours. After a few weeks of coming across people who were disoriented at the bus station, local volunteers organized and started delivering food and basic hygiene items, as well as helping people buy tickets. It was a heavy load for a band of volunteers without financial resources, and back then there were only a dozen or so migrants being dropped off.
Soon, the new Greyhound station may see not dozens, but hundreds of people dropped off each day.
Refugio is in his 50s, and his younger brother Navidad in his upper 40s. They both said they were fleeing violence in Guerrero. Unemployment also was rampant in their hometown, they said. The brothers finished their tacos and headed back to the bus station.
They sat down across from the family still waiting to figure out their next step: finding a place to spend the night.
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