2023 in photos: Immigration, homelessness drove news in San Diego County

The issues of immigration and homelessness dominated attention spans and headlines in 2023. Here’s a look at the inewsource’s take on these stories, through the lens and reporting of inewsource photo and video journalist Zoë Meyers. 

The end of Title 42

Within a climate of constantly changing United States immigration policies, Tijuana has become a waiting area for migrants desperate to enter the U.S. The drawn out end of Title 42 – a pandemic era policy which essentially closed the asylum process – left migrants in shelters throughout the city in a state of uncertainty over their future. At the Libélula shelter on the eastern outskirts of the city, women tried to keep each others’ spirits high as they held out hope for their chance to cross the border.

A deadly chase

In April of 2022, 19-year-old Jesús Manuel Saldaña Rocha died when his car swerved off I-8 in El Cajon, was sent airborne and collided with three trees. He was being chased by the United States Border Patrol. His family is still asking why agents tried to pull him over and why they pursued him when he fled, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection has refused to provide answers. 

In the tight knit community of Pauma Valley, where he grew up, Saldaña Rocha was known as “El Tigre” or “Meño.” He was beloved as a high school soccer star and caring friend, boyfriend, son and brother. At the time, Saldaña Rocha was the 11th person to die in a chase involving Border Patrol in San Diego County since 2017. inewsource reporter Sofía Mejías-Pascoe spent months digging into exactly what happened on that afternoon in 2022 and examining the use of vehicle pursuits by Border Patrol – one of the agency’s deadliest enforcement strategies.

Escaping an eviction

inewsource photojournalist Zoë Meyers first met Arley Adcock last summer when he was leaving a County of San Diego pandemic-era hotel program. The program was managed by a private contractor and was intended to shelter people at high risk for COVID-19. Many of the participants, including Adcock, were unhoused and assigned case managers who were tasked with securing permanent housing for them. 

Adcock and Meyers kept in touch as he moved between hotels and eventually into an apartment in downtown San Diego last October. In April he called with some bad news. He was facing an eviction. 

Despite the involvement of two government agencies, a private contractor and millions of dollars of public funding, he was falling through the safety net. The problem was a paperwork issue. Three weeks after inewsource published a story detailing his situation, the County of San Diego reinstated Adcock’s Section 8 housing voucher allowing him to stay in his downtown apartment.

Fleeing violence in Mexico

Over the 2023 fiscal year, the number of Mexican families fleeing violence and seeking protection across the border in San Diego tripled.  The vast majority of those families have crossed into the United States through legal ports of entry, but to do so they now must use the U.S. government’s CBP One app. This means that families trying to escape violence are often forced to wait for months in Tijuana, a city in the same country they are fleeing. 

It’s a terrifying situation a man from southern Mexico and his family of 19 found themselves in one morning in October. The man, who we’ve referred to as Jose, had a bullet wound in his back from where he was shot by local cartel members. His children helped him apply an ointment to the wound as they waited for spaces in one of the city’s migrant shelters.

Criminalization of homelessness

This summer the City of San Diego ushered in a new era of its approach to homelessness by passing a public camping ban. In the weeks leading up to the new law, inewsource documented the efforts of outreach workers to shelter unhoused residents and the city’s enforcement of the tool it had come to rely on to keep encampments out of public areas: encroachment. Since the ban’s passage we’ve checked in with those staying at the city’s new designated camping sites which are intended to serve as a place to shelter unhoused residents as the camping ban is enforced.

Stuck in the desert

In May inewsource was the first to report that hundreds of migrants were waiting to be processed by immigration authorities in the desert near Jacumba Hot Springs with little food, water or other resources. After the story’s publication, immigration authorities increased staffing at the site to process migrants. Since the spring, immigration authorities have continued to detain migrants in the area across multiple encampment sites. Families and individuals are still frequently waiting at sites for multiple days and are reliant on food and water that is provided by local aid groups.