Tim Steller's column: Demonized NGOs stand between Tucson and chaos

The gonzos are sure they’ve uncovered something bad down at the old Ramada, just south of I-10 off Palo Verde Road.

Buses come in regularly, filled with migrants — and American taxpayers are footing the bill!

The scary conclusion arrived at by internet videographers and congressmen who parachuted into town this month: Groups like Catholic Community Services in Tucson are engaged in human trafficking.

“The illegal immigration industrial complex runs deep, and it must be exposed,” Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Wisconsin Republican, said on X, the former Twitter, after visiting Tucson. “The Biden administration is funneling billions of tax dollars to NGOs to transport and lodge illegal aliens.”

This line of thinking has so deeply penetrated the political right that last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a longstanding shelter in El Paso, Annunciation House, accusing the NGO of human trafficking.

The rhetoric is powerful and has been amplified online by people with huge audiences, like Elon Musk. But that doesn’t make it true.

It really took hold when provocateur James O’Keefe showed up at the Ramada, pretended to be a drunk, was refused entry and concluded darkly, “Catholic Community Services — very shady stuff — is at the heart and soul of this people-moving operation.”

Later Reps. Tiffany and Doug LaMalfa, a California Republican, showed up with cameras rolling and repeated O’Keefe’s gimmick, demanding entry without calling ahead. They threatened subpoenas and public hearings to the confused employee who apparently had no idea what they were talking about.

At base, what these people from outside the borderlands are saying is that it’s our fault so many people are crossing the border near us and being admitted by Border Patrol. And we ought to be punished for it.

In reality, either the NGOs will help migrants move through Tucson and other border-region cities like El Paso, or hundreds of people will be released here per day, maybe a thousand on a bad day.

Imagine that number of people hanging out at Ina and Oracle, or Speedway and Campbell, or Kolb and 22nd, with nowhere to go. Of course, that’s unacceptable.

The question is who pays

For people who live in cities like Tucson and El Paso, the main question is not whether we help. Either motivated by altruistic concern for the stranger at our door, or by pragmatic concern about thousands of people being released on our streets, we’re going to help these people.

The question is who pays for the shelter and transport of migrants.

Since 2019 in Southern Arizona, it has been the federal government, to the tune of $70 million. Migrants usually spend a day or two here, then move on to another destination, where they are to await a court date.

Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher sounded the alarm in a Feb. 16 memo and at Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting that this system is about to end. Federal taxpayer money for housing and transferring migrants will be used up by the end of March or in early April.

After that, we don’t know what’s going to happen. The biggest shelter, Casa Alitas, is run by Catholic Community Services and has already warned of 30 layoffs.

The supervisors and Tucson’s City Council agreed last week that local taxpayers can’t start taking up that burden, which has been as much as $1 million per week at the peak of migrant influxes in western Pima County.

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We can’t afford it, and it shouldn’t be our responsibility anyway. It’s the federal government that is letting people in, and it should be the federal taxpayer helping us deal with them.

Supervisor Steve Christy, the only Republican on the Pima County board, doesn’t see it that way. At Tuesday’s meeting, he adopted the gonzos’ logic and blamed his current and past Democratic colleagues for the global migrant surges arriving here.

“It is not the federal government’s fault,” he said. “It’s Pima County’s fault, because we took the first dollar. We became an enabler and addicted to this money.”

“I guarantee you they’ll find another place if we don’t accept them,” he added.

None of this makes sense. Pima County isn’t making money off moving migrants through. It’s just coordinating and paying federal money for the response, some of which is carried out by hundreds of volunteers. It would cost even more without them.

And it’s largely smuggling organizations who decide where along the border migrant groups arrive. Sometimes, they take people to inhospitable places in Texas where there are no NGOs to help. Sometimes, they send people through the Tucson sector, where we have a good system.

If thousands of deaths in the Sonoran Desert hasn’t stop people from crossing here, and it hasn’t, neither would the absence of shelters like Casa Alitas.

Not all asylum seekers

This isn’t to say we aren’t fooling ourselves to some extent about the migrant waves who have arrived episodically. Not everybody who crosses is fleeing danger in their home country.

The county has taken to using the phrase “Legally Processed Asylum Seekers,” for the people who cross the border and end up in Tucson. That phrase, and especially the shorter “asylum seekers,” isn’t really accurate because many people who arrive in town have never requested asylum.

I asked Border Patrol Sector Chief John Modlin about this in January, and he acknowledged that when there is no bed space to detain people, those released have been processed but haven’t necessarily requested asylum.

“That person could be someone who has claimed (credible) fear, or it could be someone who hasn’t claimed fear,” he said.

While they aren’t necessarily seeking asylum, they are legally in the country because the Border Patrol processed them. And that puts the burden on us to do something about them.

We’ve been lucky to have federal money and an energetic community response to care for people and prevent chaotic scenes on our streets. But as things stand, there’s no hope for the federal government to resume funding.

The U.S. Senate negotiated a border-security bill that would have put $1.4 billion toward the Shelter and Services Program that covers local efforts like ours. But House Republicans, including Tiffany, rejected the bill.

The bill that Tiffany supported, HR 2, says explicitly “No funds are authorized to be appropriated for the Shelter Services Program for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

If no more federal money becomes available, in truth it will be hard to avoid spending local or state tax money on the migrants who the federal government releases on our streets. Receiving cities like Denver have been forced to make cuts — recently cutting the open hours at the city’s recreation centers — because they’ve had to spend money sheltering migrants.

It’s a shame, but it’s a necessity caused by federal laws and policies. That’s where the gonzos ought to focus their attention if they really want to solve the problem. But, of course, that’s a notoriously difficult issue tied up now in presidential politics.

It’s easier to invent someone to blame — the NGOs — and pretend to expose them. Condemning them as “traffickers” won’t just hurt the migrants but ourselves, too.