More than six months ago, we were some of the first reporters on the ground when migrant encampments started forming along the border in Jacumba, a small desert town in southeastern San Diego County.
What we saw that day in May was shocking, but has now become the norm: Migrants who had just crossed the U.S. through gaps in the border wall, including young children and pregnant women, waiting in the open desert with little food, water and shelter from the elements.
Today, tens of thousands of migrants have passed through these encampments — right in our backyards — where they wait to be processed by immigration authorities. They’ve come from as far as China, Turkey and Russia and as close as Mexico.
Aid workers on the ground have called it a humanitarian crisis. An emergency medicine professor called the encampments “a mass casualty event waiting to happen.”
And yet the encampments have become a fixture along the county’s border with Mexico as people from around the world leave their countries amid crime, poverty, natural disasters and political upheaval.
This is all happening as congressional lawmakers prepare to present what could be the most significant policy changes to asylum and the border in more than 20 years, and as the nation considers who will be the next person to run the country and lead immigration affairs.
That’s why inewsource sent a team of four reporters, including myself, to spend 48 hours covering the migrant encampments in San Diego County. We set out to give our readers an in-depth picture of our border region.
We worked around the clock in teams of two, shifting between several encampments in Jacumba and Boulevard. We talked with volunteers on the ground, agents on patrol and the migrants at the center of this story.
This coverage offers just a snapshot in time during a historic moment in U.S. immigration.
We’ll be publishing our story this week. Subscribe to our newsletter to get the story first, and follow us on Instagram for upcoming behind-the-scenes looks at our reporting.
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