Pima County closing its two migrant aid shelters

Two migrant-aid respite shelters in Pima County will be shut down, County Administrator Jan Lesher said Thursday.

No asylum-seekers have been released to shelters in Tucson from Border Patrol custody since President Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday, Lesher said. This means the county will get no more reimbursements to fund the shelters’ operations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter Services Program.

The two centers closing are the 650-bed shelter on Drexel Road, which has been run by for-profit AMI Expeditionary Healthcare since July 2024, and the 140-bed Welcome Center, known as Casa Alitas, on East Ajo Way. Casa Alitas is the migrant-aid program of Catholic Community Services.

The shelters will close by midnight Jan. 26, to give migrants time to leave for their destination cities.

“This puts the County in a very precarious financial position,” Lesher wrote in a memo to the Board of Supervisors. “Whether there are people under shelter or not, the County still incurs operational costs from its contractors for staffing readiness, shelter amenity rentals (such as the portable showers), heating and cooling costs, and more.”

The program is entirely federally funded and no Pima County tax dollars go towards it. Lesher said the respite centers are closing to protect the current budget.

The county is also canceling its contract with AMI Expeditionary Healthcare, which runs the Drexel Center, on Sunday, said Pima County spokesman Mark Evans.

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Without government reimbursements, the money from these contracts would fall on the county.

“Once we shut down, we shut it down,” Evans said. “There’s no interim status.”

Without secure funding from the government, shelters could remain dark even if the Border Patrol restarts releasing people in Tucson.

The future of street releases in Arizona border counties is unknown, Lesher wrote. But if the releases resume, she said many migrants could be unsheltered and homeless.

“It took us years to build up our sheltering infrastructure and acquire services and staffing contracts,” Lesher wrote. “Dismantling it will be abrupt.”

The Pima County migrant-aid program started in 2019 and grew in 2023 when the number of asylum-seekers increased. The county has sheltered approximately 518,868 asylum-seekers since 2019 and received more than $117 million from the federal government for temporary sheltering.

“This will likely bring to a close one of the most significant humanitarian aid programs undertaken by Pima County and its regional partners in the County’s history,” Lesher wrote.