HOMELESS CAMP NEAR BORDER SHUT

About 800 offered shelter at Baja-run site near Tecate

By Sandra Dibble12:01 a.m.Dec. 20, 2013

TIJUANA — Baja California authorities on Thursday launched the dismantling of a homeless camp near the U.S. border that houses many deportees, a response to rising complaints that their presence has led to growing crime and drug-addiction problems near the downtown business district.

An estimated 700 residents of the camp in Plaza Mexico and an additional 100 living in the channel of the Tijuana River are being offered transportation to a provisional, state-run shelter miles away near the Tecate border. There, each has been promised a mattress, three meals per day, warm showers, access to a telephone and help with moving forward.

“We’re calling this a temporary shelter, but what we’ve been told is that it will be permanent until we’ve resolved every person’s situation,” said Xóchitl Méndez, an official with the state’s social services agency, DIF.
On Thursday afternoon, the first group of 59 volunteers made the journey to the shelter, which is set in a vacant and unfinished state facility adjacent to the State’s Public Safety Academy.

At sundown, workers were setting up giant tents that are expected to serve as dormitories. The residents were preparing to spend their first night inside the structure, where mattresses lined the floor of a big room.

“They were offering us a lot of help,” said Eduardo Bolaño, a 20-year-old deportee hoping to return to Santa Rosa, where his wife is expecting their first child. Since his deportation seven days ago, Bolaño has been sleeping in a small tent set up by the group Angeles Sin Fronteras, but said rain has been seeping into his tent and “police were bothering us. If we were just walking down the street, they’d pick us up.”

In its first phase, the shelter will have capacity for 300 people, Méndez said. The sprawling compound, a state prison that was never completed, could ultimately hold as many as 1,500 people, she said.

Many people in Thursday’s group were deported from the United States, Méndez said.

Starting today, the shelter will begin offering an array of government services to address their multiple needs — from basic medical care to treatment for drug addiction to bus tickets back to their home communities.

One problem many deportees face when they are sent back to Mexico is the lack of identification documents. Méndez said the shelter residents will receive assistance in retrieving their birth certificates so they can obtain a government I.D.

It was unclear Thursday whether the state is receiving financial assistance for the shelter and related services. Authorities in Tijuana, Mexicali and other large northern border cities in Mexico have complained that their communities are paying a heavy price for the high influx of deportees in recent years, and have been asking for federal help in addressing the resulting social problems.

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