Pricey Inequality Insights readers,
San Diego port officers employed a contractor to filter out a waterfront homeless encampment final week the place a few dozen asylum seekers have been residing. For months, asylum seekers had been tenting within the César Chávez Park in Barrio Logan, however the port’s Harbor Police advised them they needed to depart or face arrest or quotation, which may jeopardize their asylum circumstances. Native officers cited Gov. Gavin Newsom’s July 25 government order to take away homeless encampments from public property.
Advocates and non-profits helped many of the migrant households, particularly these with kids, transfer into inns earlier than the sweep. However Heidy Salazar, a 39-year-old mom from Venezuela, was amongst these pressured out of the park. Salazar stated she has a 2-year-old little one who was in a hospital final week in Venezuela, having bother respiration. She was staying within the park alone.
“I wouldn’t come back here if they had given me a place where I can be stable, comfortable, where I can be with my mind at ease. You can’t imagine all the anxiety and everything that one lives with here every night,” Salazar advised CalMatters final week simply earlier than the encampment sweep. Since arriving in america a number of weeks in the past, Salazar slept in a big tent, cooking rice and carne asada on prime of a camp range for different asylum seekers. At one level, about 50 to 100 individuals lived within the park, in keeping with advocates, officers, and asylum seekers.
“We became like a small family,” stated Michael, 28, an asylum seeker additionally from Venezuela who stated he had been staying within the encampment for about two months earlier than port officers cleared it final week. He requested CalMatters to not use his final identify due to his susceptible state of affairs and to guard the protection of his household, nonetheless in Venezuela.
Advocates stated that whereas the situations within the park weren’t superb, that they had no less than offered a way of stability and neighborhood. Dad and mom whose kids play soccer within the park complained to native tv stations earlier this month, drawing consideration to the tents.
“The Port of San Diego’s responsibility to all visitors of San Diego Bay and the surrounding waterfront is to protect public access and use of our public spaces as well as public health and safety,” wrote spokesperson Brianne Mundy Web page in an emailed assertion.
“These people don’t have anywhere else to go,” stated Ian M. Seruelo, the chair of the Chair of the San Diego Immigrants Rights Consortium, which has urged native officers to take a extra compassionate strategy than utilizing regulation enforcement to focus on asylum seekers. He stated the migrants face distinctive challenges like not being allowed to work and language boundaries. Some are caught in San Diego for his or her immigration court docket circumstances.
Seruelo was amongst a handful of immigrant rights advocates who monitored Thursday’s cleanup from a distance to ensure the asylum seekers weren’t arrested or cited. Nobody was cited or arrested in the course of the sweep, stated Lt. Victor Banuelos with the Harbor Police. When requested what would occur to the migrants’ belongings, he stated, “All of this stuff was abandoned.”
The County of San Diego is within the strategy of opening a Migrant Transition Day Middle with $19.6 million in federal funding however county officers famous the middle is not going to provide long-term or everlasting housing.
“We recognize regional homelessness is a challenging issue, and we remain committed to approaching it with compassion and humanity through collaboration with community and public agency partners,” Mundy Web page wrote in her assertion on behalf of the port.
