SAN ANTONIO — The Biden administration is expecting to see 10,000 migrants cross the border each day once Title 42 expires next Thursday.
That pandemic-era rule allowed for the faster deportation of migrants due to public health concerns, and officials anticipated more migrants to seek asylum once it lifted.
Instead, San Antonio is seeing numbers spiking early.
"The City of San Antonio’s Migrant Resource Center is over capacity, as the number of migrants traveling through San Antonio has continued to rise," the city said in a statement this week. "Over the past week, the number of migrants sheltered at the Migrant Resource Center (MRC) and Airport has quadrupled.... This situation is not sustainable and continued funding from the federal government is uncertain."
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX-28) said he is working to secure more federal funding for issue. That money could be allocated to the City of San Antonio, or to Catholic Charities, in order to find more space to serve migrants.
Congressman Cuellar discussed the challenges of Texas is currently facing at a press conference Friday.
Catholic Charities already runs the Migrant Resource Center on San Pedro, which can house just over 700 individuals. Antonio Fernandez, the president and CEO of Catholic Charities, said they have been over capacity nearly every day.
"There was a couple of times that we were over capacity in the building so we had to have people in the parking lot," Fernandez said.
Fernandez said the organization would need more funding before they looked at additional places to house people.
While Title 42 is expiring, Cuellar said the Biden administration still had plenty of options to deport individuals under United States Code Title 8.
"Under Title 8, there is actually some teeth. If you are deported you cannot come back. There is a bar for five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years or lifetime, depending on the facts." Cuellar said. "If it is done correctly you can see what you need to do at the border."
Cuellar said the Biden administration was making other changes that will eventually help, though he said they should have been implemented earlier.
"It's a little late, but they are finally doing some things that will have an impact. Since it was implemented late we are going to see large numbers of people coming in late at this time," Cuellar said.
One measure is an agreement between Panama, Columbia and the United States that would stop some migrants traveling between Panama and Columbia before they attempted to travel north.
Another measure involves placing asylum officers within Border Patrol facilities so those officers could expedite a migrant's asylum case.
Cuellar also said there could be rules enforced that would deport people back across the border anytime they came across without using an official port of entry.
Finally, Cuellar said that to seek asylum, according to U.S. law, you have to be prove you have been persecuted by the state. He said that law could end up returning many migrants after their immigration hearing.
"A lot of these cases are going to be rejected," he said. "And a lot of folks that we have here, with all due respect, are probably not supposed to be here if you apply the law the way it is supposed to be applied."
>MORE BORDER NEWS: