By Corinne Murdock |

Pima County officials are warning that the community will suffer from a homeless crisis of illegal immigrants come Easter Sunday after federal funding for illegal immigrant support runs out.

County officials estimate that there will be as many as 400 to 1,000 illegal immigrants released by border agents into Tucson daily.

The county has spent about $1 million a week to shelter around 1,000 illegal immigrants — bussed in by state-contracted coach transportation — using funds sourced from the federal Shelter and Services Program. If the county were to take on all the sheltering and service costs, taxpayers would be putting up between $50 and $60 million a year. 

About a billion in federal funding for SSP was tied into the failed foreign aid bill engineered by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ). SSP was specifically allocated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to mitigate illegal immigrant shelter and service costs borne by non-federal entities.

The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) allocated $363.8 million to SSP for the 2023 fiscal year. Pima County received over $12 million from SSP. These funds went to Catholic Community Services’ (CCS) Casa Alitas shelters, which served as a middle man of sorts amid the Border Patrol’s catch and release of illegal immigrants. Without federal funds, illegal immigrants will likely end up living on the streets. 

The World Hunger Ecumenical Task Force (WHETF) in Maricopa County received nearly $8.5 million. WHETF of Cochise County received $150,000, and Yuma County WHETF received over $11 million.

Last month, Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher warned the Board of Supervisors (BOS) in a memo that the county no longer had sufficient funding to continue shelter and other services for illegal immigrants. 

Lesher advised the board that she had instructed a full stop to county coordination, contracts management, and funding reimbursement of the shelter services on Easter Sunday. Currently, the county’s Grants Management and Innovation Office, Office of Emergency Management, and Procurement are winding down those processes.

The county administrator explained that illegal immigrants would flock to Tucson from across Pima, Cochise, and Santa Cruz counties because the city offers more transportation opportunities and homelessness support than the rural counties.

“There is already a difficult homeless problem in Pima County that we are working tirelessly to solve or mitigate,” said Lesher. “What we are about to experience with street releases is homelessness on steroids.”

The county is considering two plans for handling the anticipated influx of roving illegal immigrants. However, Lesher advised against any of the plans as “imprudent,” arguing that the border crisis was a federal problem that should be covered by federal funding. 

“This is a crisis of the federal government’s making due to the failure to pass sensible border and immigration reform and to provide the necessary funding to local jurisdictions forced to deal with the deleterious effects of federal border policy,” said Lesher.

The first plan would involve a county-owned building, the Mission Facility west of the Pima County Adult Detention Complex. One version of the plan would cost over $126,000 a month and another $40,000 for necessary materials. The illegal immigrants would be bussed and released to the location, and upon arrival given only the “bare necessities:” utilities, maintenance, janitorial services, 24-hour security, and communication aids such as an A-frame sign and language-specific cards and fliers. Under this plan, the county would not provide food or transportation. A second version of the plan would increase costs to over $396,900 a month to provide support staffing and food, but not transportation.

The second plan would make use of the county-owned Pima Fairgrounds “Raceway” and install the rental of a large tent and portable showers. That would cost $305,100 to erect and about $283,200 to maintain monthly, minimum. Additional costs have yet to be discerned. 

Of the five viable non-county buildings and properties, the owners either expressed no interest in housing illegal immigrants or the properties were unsuitable for mass sheltering operations. 

Among the services discontinued, per a memo issued to the BOS earlier this month, will be both the short and long-distance transportation services for asylum seekers (ending August 15 and April 11, respectively), staffing support services for humanitarian assistance program (ending May 11), and food service county congregate and non-congregate shelters (ending May 31). Another program, hotel shelter services for COVID-positive asylum seekers, will conclude next week. 

Although those dates extend beyond Lesher’s directive to stop county efforts as of Easter Sunday, the county administrator noted in her February memo to BOS that she was planning for the possibility of reimbursement requests coming in after the programs conclude. 

Per the county administrator’s last weekly situational report, issued in mid-February, there was a daily average of 910 arrivals and weekly average of over 6,300 arrivals. Since Jan. 1, 2019, the county has recorded over 405,000 releases in the area.

Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.