Mayor of California border town says soon thousands of migrants will flood the streets and ‘destroy businesses’ as overwhelmed shelters buckle under crisis

A California mayor fears migrants will eventually flood the streets of his city because a nearby migrant center went bankrupt after just five months.

Nonprofit organization SBCS closed its doors Thursday after wasting $6 million in taxpayer money in just a few months.

The migrant center, formerly known as South Bay Community Services, said the number of people needing assistance “increased significantly” during that time.

The center, located in Chula Vista, had been receiving people crossing the San Diego border, which totaled more than 100,000 people in the past five months.

The mayor of nearby El Cajon, Bill Wells, has now said this Fox news that he fears the closure will create a “serious problem” for his community.

Migrants board a U.S. Border Patrol patrol vehicle in San Diego, California on February 13, 2024

The Republican is concerned that migrants will gather in his city after the nonprofit closes. Here are photos of migrants being brought to El Cajon

This photo shows migrants after being bused to El Cajon, the city over which Mayor Wells rules

He told the newspaper: “In recent months we have seen 100,000 migrants cross the border into San Diego.

“A lot of them were taken care of by this provincial shelter that used taxpayer money.

“They asked for $3 million and spent over $6 million, and now they say they have no more money. So we will see migrants congregating in our streets.

“At the same time this is happening, the Border Patrol is telling us we’re going from 300 drop-offs a day to 1,000 drop-offs a day.

“I think it’s going to become a pretty serious problem pretty quickly. They spend up to $8,000 per person per month to house someone in a hotel.

“It’s ruining the neighborhoods, it’s destroying the hotels, it’s destroying our security infrastructure and it’s really bad for everyone.”

Announcing the centre’s closure, CEO Kathie Lembo said: ‘As the number of migrants arriving at the center has increased significantly in recent weeks, our finite resources have been stretched to the limit, leading to the closure of the center on February 22.

“When we accepted the challenge of this work last October, we knew two things: that it spoke to the core of our mission, and that it was for a limited time.”

Speaking about the $6 million the center burned, Lembo added: “With the receipt of that money, there was an expectation that it would be used until the end of March, so ending it a month early raises concerns and questions for me .’

Employees of a charity organization provide food to migrants on February 13, 2024 in San Diego, California

A Border Patrol agent patrols a construction site for the secondary border fence that follows the length of the primary border fence separating the United States and Mexico in the San Diego Sector on August 22, 2019

A Border Patrol agent asks asylum-seeking migrants to set up at a makeshift, mountainous campsite after the group crosses the border into Mexico on Friday, Feb. 2, 2024, near Jacumba Hot Springs

Border Patrol agents have had 18,700 encounters with Mexican nationals in San Diego so far since the start of the fiscal year last October

Asylum seekers wait in line to be processed by Border Patrol agents at a makeshift camp near the U.S.-Mexico border east of Jacumba, San Diego County, California, January 2, 2024

Earlier this week, it emerged that the San Diego border had seen a big jump in the number of Chinese migrants being detained.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has recorded 21,000 encounters with Chinese nationals in the San Diego sector since the fiscal year began in October, according to CBP data obtained by Fox news that is not yet public.

That’s more than the 18,700 encounters with Mexican nationals during the same period, and second only to the 28,000 Colombians CBP reportedly met in the sector.

In fiscal year 2023, CBP reported that 24,048 Chinese citizens were apprehended by Border Patrol at the southern border – more than ten times more than the 1,970 arrests recorded during fiscal year 2022, and just 323 the year before.

Speaking about the number of Chinese migrants at the border, Wells added: ‘I went to the border recently and came across an encampment of people and everyone of them was a Chinese migrant, that’s a really serious concern.

“It makes me nervous to see enemies of our nation gathering in our city. We have no idea how many are in El Cajon.”

A U.S. Border Patrol chief warned that his agents are being overwhelmed by the flow of Chinese migrants crossing the border and warned they could be communist spies.

A migrant from China holds up his passport and paperwork as he is photographed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in an open-air holding area as they prepare to board a bus to a processing facility near the small, desert border community of San Diego County. Jacumba Hot Springs in December 2023

A group of people, including many from China, walk along the wall after crossing the border with Mexico to seek asylum near Jacumba, California, on October 24

Chief Patrol Agent Anthony Good, of the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, said last year that his agents “did their best to find out why (individuals are coming from other continents)” but that “information can be hidden” and “their agendas, their ideologies, the reason for their arrival could be missed’.

This week, new figures emerged showing that seven million migrants had managed to reach the southern border under President Biden.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show that 961,537 border conflicts have been reported this fiscal year alone.

The year, which runs from October to September, is already at its current pace, breaking last year’s record of 2,475,669.

Since Biden took office, the total number of encounters at the southwestern land border has reached a staggering 7,298,486.

The total does not include the estimated 1.8 million known “escapees” who managed to evade law enforcement.

That number is larger than the individual populations of 36 states, including Alabama, Colorado, Maryland, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.