Dear Inequality Insights readers,
San Diego port officials hired a contractor to clear out a waterfront homeless encampment last week where about a dozen asylum seekers were living. For months, asylum seekers had been camping in the César Chávez Park in Barrio Logan, but the port’s Harbor Police told them they had to leave or face arrest or citation, which could jeopardize their asylum cases. Local officials cited Gov. Gavin Newsom’s July 25 executive order to remove homeless encampments from public property.
Advocates and non-profits helped most of the migrant families, especially those with children, move into hotels before the sweep. But Heidy Salazar, a 39-year-old mother from Venezuela, was among those forced out of the park. Salazar said she has a 2-year-old child who was in a hospital last week in Venezuela, having trouble breathing. She was staying in the park alone.
“I wouldn’t come back here if they had given me a place where I can be stable, comfortable, where I can be with my mind at ease. You can’t imagine all the anxiety and everything that one lives with here every night,” Salazar told CalMatters last week just before the encampment sweep. Since arriving in the United States several weeks ago, Salazar slept in a large tent, cooking rice and carne asada on top of a camp stove for other asylum seekers. At one point, about 50 to 100 people lived in the park, according to advocates, officials, and asylum seekers.
“We became like a small family,” said Michael, 28, an asylum seeker also from Venezuela who said he had been staying in the encampment for about two months before port officials cleared it last week. He asked CalMatters not to use his last name because of his vulnerable situation and to protect the safety of his family, still in Venezuela.
Advocates said that while the conditions in the park weren’t ideal, they had at least provided a sense of stability and community. Parents whose children play soccer in the park complained to local television stations earlier this month, drawing attention to the tents.
“The Port of San Diego’s responsibility to all visitors of San Diego Bay and the surrounding waterfront is to protect public access and use of our public spaces as well as public health and safety,” wrote spokesperson Brianne Mundy Page in an emailed statement.
“These people don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Ian M. Seruelo, the chair of the Chair of the San Diego Immigrants Rights Consortium, which has urged local officials to take a more compassionate approach than using law enforcement to target asylum seekers. He said the migrants face unique challenges like not being allowed to work and language barriers. Some are stuck in San Diego for their immigration court cases.
Seruelo was among a handful of immigrant rights advocates who monitored Thursday’s cleanup from a distance to make sure the asylum seekers weren’t arrested or cited. No one was cited or arrested during the sweep, said Lt. Victor Banuelos with the Harbor Police. When asked what would happen to the migrants’ belongings, he said, “All of this stuff was abandoned.”
The County of San Diego is in the process of opening a Migrant Transition Day Center with $19.6 million in federal funding but county officials noted the center will not offer long-term or permanent housing.
“We recognize regional homelessness is a challenging issue, and we remain committed to approaching it with compassion and humanity through collaboration with community and public agency partners,” Mundy Page wrote in her statement on behalf of the port.
DON’T MISS
- Health inspections. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law this week allowing county health officers to conduct inspections in federal detention centers operated by private companies, including all six for-profit federal immigration detention centers in California. Private detention operators have been accused of cutting corners to maximize profits, which advocates argue could jeopardize the health and safety of those employed or detained in these facilities. California Healthline reported on contaminated water, moldy food and air ducts spewing black dust within the facilities.
- Tax disparities. Among American households in the top 20% of the income distribution, Asian American households pay a higher average individual tax rate than white households, according to a post on the Brookings Institute website. That’s largely because Asian Americans earn more of their income from labor while white households are more likely to own tax-favored assets, the Washington D.C.-based research organization found.
- Forced deportations. Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday called for the state to remember the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, when nearly two million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, the Sacramento Bee reported. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover issued an executive order to forcibly remove Mexicans and Mexican Americans to save job opportunities for other Americans during the Great Depression, according to the Bee.
- Supermarket redlining. On average, Black households pay disproportionately higher prices than white households at the grocery store checkout line, with fewer options for bargain-hunting in food deserts. Word in Black, a collaboration of Black news publishers, wrote about the issue last week. Black consumer spending on food is set to grow each year between 2021 and 2030, according to a 2022 report from the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility, a nonprofit policy center.
- Hotel strike. Thousands of San Francisco hotel workers approved a potential strike earlier this month, and hundreds of hotel staffers in San José are prepared to walk off the job over wages and staffing levels. Their union is negotiating with some of the industries largest names – Hilton, Hyatt and Marriot, KQED reported. Across the U.S., more than 10,000 workers in over 50 hotels have already voted to strike, USA Today reported.
- Housing funding. The California Department of Social Services announced eight Community Care Expansion (CCE) program grants totaling $112.8 million for new housing projects across the state. The projects – aimed at supporting independent living older adults who are at risk of experiencing homelessness – will create new housing at licensed adult and senior care residences. One housing project is for elders on tribal lands.
Thanks for following our work on the California Divide team. While you’re here, please tell us what kinds of stories you’d love to read. Email us at inequalityinsights@calmatters.org.
Thanks for reading,
Wendy and The California Divide Team