Arriving Monday, April 4, 2022, in Tijuana, Mexico, as they look for a way to apply for asylum in the United States. A loose volunteer coalition, largely from Slavic churches in the western United States, is guiding hundreds of refugees daily from the airport in the Mexican border city of Tijuana to hotels, churches and shelters, where they wait two to four days for U.S officials to admit them on humanitarian parole. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
US speeds entry for Ukrainians as more reach Mexico border.
By ELLIOT SPAGAT Associated Press
TIJUANA, Mexico — The United States has sharply increased the number of Ukrainians admitted to the country at the Mexican border as even more refugees fleeing the Russian invasion follow the same circuitous route. A government recreation center in the Mexican border city of Tijuana grew to about 1,000 refugees Thursday, according to city officials.
A canopy under which children played soccer only two days earlier was packed with people in rows of chairs and lined with bunk beds.
Tijuana has suddenly become a final stop for Ukrainians seeking refuge in the United States, where they are drawn by friends and families ready to host them and are convinced the U.S. will be a more suitable haven than Europe. Word has spread rapidly on social media that a loose volunteer coalition, largely from Slavic churches in the western United States, is guiding hundreds of refugees daily from the Tijuana airport to temporary shelters, where they wait two to four days for U.S officials to admit them on humanitarian parole.
In less than two weeks, volunteers worked with U.S. and Mexican officials to build a remarkably efficient and expanding network to provide food, security, transportation
and shelter.
U.S. officials began funneling Ukrainians Wednesday to a pedestrian crossing in San Diego that is temporarily closed to the public, hoping to process 578 people a day there with 24 officers, said Enrique Lucero, the city of Tijuana’s director of migrant affairs.
Vlad Fedoryshyn, a volunteer with access to a waiting list, said Thursday that the U.S. processed 620 Ukrainians over 24 hours, while about 800 others are arriving daily in Tijuana. Volunteers say the U.S. was previously admitting a few hundred Ukrainians daily. CBP didn’t provide numbers in response to questions about operations and plans over the last two days, saying only that it has expanded facilities in San Diego to deal with humanitarian cases.
On Thursday, Ukrainians steadily arrived and left the bustling recreation center, wheeling large suitcases. Some wore winter coats in unseasonably warm weather. A Tijuana camp that had held hundreds of Ukrainians near the busiest border crossing with the U.S. was dismantled. Refugees dispersed to the recreation center, churches and hotels to wait.
The volunteers, who wear blue and yellow badges to represent the Ukrainian flag but have no group name or leader, started a waiting list on notepads and later switched to a mobile app normally used to track church attendance.
Ukrainians are told to report to a U.S. border crossing as their numbers approach,
system organizers liken to waiting for a restaurant table. “We feel so lucky, so blessed,” said Tatiana Bondarenko, who traveled through Moldova, Romania, Austria and Mexico before arriving in San Diego with her husband and children, ages 8, 12, and 15.
Her final destination was Sacramento, California, to live with her mother, who she hadn’t seen in 15 years.
Another Ukrainian family posed nearby for photos under a U.S. Customs and Border Protection sign at San Diego’s San Ysidro port of entry, the busiest crossing between the U.S. and Mexico. Volunteers under a blue canopy offered snacks while refugees waited for family to pick them up or for buses to take them to a nearby church. At the Tijuana airport, weary travelers who enter Mexico as tourists in Mexico City or Cancun are directed to a makeshift lounge in the terminal with a sign in black marker that reads,
“Only for Ukrainian Refugees.”
It is the only place to register to enter the U.S.
The waiting list stood at 973 families or single adults Tuesday.
“We realized we had a problem that the government wasn’t going to solve,
so, we solved it,” said Phil Metzger, pastor of Calvary Church in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista, where about 75 members host Ukrainian families and another 100 refugees sleep on air mattresses and pews. Metzger, whose pastoral work has taken him to Ukraine and Hungary, calls the operation “duct tape and glue,” but refugees prefer it to overwhelmed European countries, where millions of Ukrainians have settled.
The Biden administration has said it will accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians, but Mexico
is the only route producing big numbers. Appointments at U.S. consulates in Europe are scarce, and refugee resettlement takes time. The administration set a refugee resettlement cap of 125,000 in the 12-month period that ends Sept. 30 but accepted only 8,758 by March 31, including 704 Ukrainians. In the previous year, it capped refugee resettlement at 62,500 but took only 11,411, including 803 Ukrainians.
The administration paroled more than 76,000 Afghans through U.S. airports in response to the departure of American troops last year, but nothing similar is afoot for Ukrainians. Parole, which grants temporary protection from deportation, is generally given for two years for Afghans and one year for Ukrainians. Oksana Dugnyk, 36, hesitated to leave her home in Bucha but acquiesced to her husband’s wishes before Russian troops invaded the town and left behind streets strewn with corpses.
The couple worried about violence in Mexico with three young children, but the robust volunteer presence in Tijuana reassured them, and a friend in Ohio agreed to host them. “We have food. We have a place to stay,” Dugnyk said a day after arriving at the Tijuana recreation center, where hundreds slept on a basketball court.
“We hope everything will be fine.” Alerted by text message or social media, Ukrainians are summoned to the border crossing as their numbers nearby.
The arrival of Ukrainians comes as the Biden administration prepares for much larger numbers when pandemic-related asylum limits for all nationalities end May 23.
Since March 2020, the U.S. has used Title 42 authority, named for a 1944 public health law, to suspend rights to seek asylum under U.S. law and international treaty. Metzger, the Chula Vista pastor, said his church cannot long continue its 24-hour-a-day pace helping refugees, and he suspects U.S. authorities will not adopt what volunteers have done.
“If you make something go smoothly, then everybody’s going to come,” he said.
17-year-old Ukrainian girl remains in U.S. custody after border separation – CBS News
BY CAMILO MONTOYA-GALVEZ
On Wednesday evening, Yelyzaveta, 17, who was training to be a missionary in Mexico, traveled to the San Ysidro U.S. border crossing in Southern California alongside Alina Dolinenko, 21, a fellow missionary trainee from Ukraine. Unable to return to war-torn Ukraine, Yelyzaveta and Dolinenko hoped to enter the U.S. to live with a Maryland resident who sponsored their missionary program in Mexico.
U.S. border officials have been allowing hundreds of Ukrainians to enter the country
per day through the San Ysidro crossing after being instructed in early March to consider exempting those with Ukrainian passports from pandemic-era restrictions currently blocking other migrants from seeking asylum.
But when they were processed at the San Ysidro port of entry, Dolinenko said U.S. border officials told them that Yelyzaveta could not be immediately allowed to enter the country because she was a minor and was not traveling with her parents or legal guardians. U.S. border officials told them that they would take Yelyzaveta “away for an indefinite period
of time, because she has no right to cross without her parents,” said Dolinenko, who was allowed into the U.S. “She cried a lot.”
A 2008 law requires U.S. border officials to temporarily hold undocumented children
who are processed without their parents or legal guardians until they can transfer them
to shelters overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The law generally requires this transfer to occur within 72 hours.
The law was designed to protect migrant children from violence and trafficking, and has mainly been applied to minors from Central America, who make up the vast majority of unaccompanied youth in HHS care.
However, the unprecedented number of Ukrainians flying to Mexico to try to escape the Russian invasion and gain quick entry into the U.S. has led to that anti-trafficking law affecting a small number of Ukrainian children.
As of Friday, HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement was housing at least four Ukrainian children recently transferred from U.S. border custody, a U.S. government official told CBS News, requesting anonymity to discuss internal data.
CBS News is using only Yelyzaveta’s first name because she is a minor.
Her exact whereabouts were unknown on Saturday. Sharon Fletcher, the Maryland resident who was hoping to provide housing to Yelyzaveta and Dolinenko, said Yelyzaveta told her during a two-minute call on Thursday that she remained in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody.
“She just burst into tears, saying, ‘I don’t want to be here,'” Fletcher told CBS News.
“She doesn’t want to be in that place. She wants to be free.”
Representatives for CBP and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about Yelyzaveta’s processing and whereabouts. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A U.S. official said that Yelyzaveta was not in an HHS shelter as of Friday evening.
Fletcher runs a non-profit organization called Forgotten Places, which she said sponsors a program called Youth With A Mission that trains young Christian missionaries across the world, including in Mexico. Yelyzaveta arrived in Mexico in January to join Youth With A Mission, Fletcher said.
After the war in Ukraine started, Fletcher said she told Yelyzaveta and Dolinenko that she would host them in her Maryland home, noting that Yelyzaveta does not have family in the U.S.
Fletcher said Yelyzaveta has not been able to contact her parents for months and that her brother remains in Ukraine helping to transport civilians displaced by the war. The family used to live in Vorzel, a town in the outskirts of Kyiv that was occupied by Russian forces last month.
If Yelyzaveta is transferred to an HHS shelter or foster home, she would remain in government custody until she turns 18 in June unless she’s released to a sponsor in the U.S. According to a Ukrainian passport reviewed by CBS News, Yelyzaveta was born on June 6, 2004.
However, HHS typically only releases unaccompanied children to family members,
such as parents, older siblings, grandparents, uncles and aunts. The agency can place unaccompanied children with sponsors who are not family members but the process is lengthier because of heightened vetting, unless the child’s parents consent to the release.
Fletcher urged the government to release Yelyzaveta as soon as possible to ensure she’s not further traumatized by her time in U.S. custody. Fletcher said she’s ready to sponsor and host Yelyzaveta.
“To let somebody sit in a cell, or in this facility, knowing that her parents are stranded, she’s not even sure whether they are alive or not, there’s a war going on in Ukraine,
I mean all this trauma, no human being should go through that — that’s what bothers me,” Fletcher said.
Fletcher said she has reached out to several congressional offices about Yelyzaveta’s situation, including Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, whose staff told her
they are looking into the matter.
Ukrainian single adults and families traveling with children are being processed at U.S. ports of entry along the southern border under exemptions to a pandemic-era restriction known as Title 42, which is being used to quickly expel other migrants to Mexico or their home countries.
Facing limited legal pathways to reach the U.S. directly, thousands of Ukrainians have traveled to Tijuana in recent weeks hoping to benefit from the Title 42 exemptions.
After their numbers come up on an ad hoc list set up by volunteers,
Ukrainians show up to the San Ysidro crossing to ask for permission to enter the U.S.
Last week alone, nearly 3,000 Ukrainians were processed by U.S. border officials, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CBS News Wednesday. In February, U.S. authorities along the Mexican border reported encountering fewer than 300 Ukrainians, CBP data show.
Dolinenko, the young missionary trainee who traveled with Yelyzaveta, said she’s
currently in San Diego waiting to see if U.S. border officials will release Yelyzaveta.
“I’m very worried,” she said over a WhatsApp message.
Ed O’Keefe contributed reporting.
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