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ariz. gets $55m for migrant border aid

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FEMA to award grants to local communities

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by Rafael Carranza

The Arizona Republic

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Nonprofits and local governments in Arizona will receive more than $54 million to continue providing humanitarian assistance to migrants released at the state’s border with Mexico, the federal government announced Friday, April 12.

The funding is part of the Shelter and Services Program, which is jointly administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Congress replenished the program in March, when they allocated $650 million as part of a supplemental funding package passed to avoid a government shutdown.

FEMA will award the grants to local communities in two separate rounds. The first round announced on Friday totaled about $300 million. The second round will be awarded in a new competitive process by the end of September, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The four states along the U.S.-Mexico border are slated to get more than half of the funding from the first round. Texas will receive $62.4 million, Arizona $54.6 million, California $45.2 million and New Mexico $4.1 million.

The rest of the funding will go to communities in the interior of the country, which have also been struggling to accommodate and assist large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers arriving to their cities. Some of the biggest recipients in the interior include New York City, which will get $38.9 million, and Atlanta, which will get $10.1 million.

Nonprofits and local governments in Arizona faced a March 31 financial cliff that threatened to upend a system they developed to prevent having the border officials release migrants into the streets of border communities in southern Arizona.

Pima County, which is the fiscal agency that distributes funding to nonprofits and local governments in southern Arizona, will receive $21.8 million of the funds allocated to the state. The county ran out of funds to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants on March 31, but said this funding announcement will cover retroactive costs for expenses incurred over the past two weeks.

“The size of this award is an acknowledgment by the Biden Administration of the benefit that our coalition provides to the country and the people of Arizona, Pima County and Tucson. Easing suffering, facilitating travel, and protecting the health and welfare of our border-county communities is a win for everyone,” Adelita Grijalva, the chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, said in a written statement.

“This funding gives us the breathing room to work towards a better solution that, at the very least, will relieve local governments of the burden of mitigating the effects of federal border control and immigration policy,” she added.

In addition to Pima County, other local governments and nonprofits in Arizona will receive large awards. Maricopa County will get $11.6 million, World Hunger Ecumenical Arizona Task Force in Maricopa County will also receive $11.6 million, while World Hunger Ecumenical Arizona Task Force in Yuma County will receive $9.5 million.

The funding allocated for Fiscal Year 2024 is less than the $780 million set aside for local governments and nonprofits providing humanitarian assistance in 2023. That year, FEMA awarded a bulk of the funding to communities in the interior of the country.

Arizona lawmakers pressed FEMA and Customs and Border Protection to prioritize border communities when determining how to distribute the money, and to get it communities quickly.

Arizona’s independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly released a joint statement praising Friday’s announcement. The two senators led efforts to secure federal funding since large-scale migrant releases began in Arizona in 2018.

“Arizona’s local governments and nonprofits are on the frontlines doing the vital work that keeps asylum seekers and communities safe, and this funding will help them continue operations and support our border communities,” Kelly said.

“Today’s funds will help Arizona border nonprofits keep their doors open preventing street releases and providing humane treatment of migrants seeking asylum,” Sinema added.

Arizona’s Democratic delegation in the House also welcomed Friday’s announcement, touting changes they advocated for such as acceptable error rates in data reporting for A-numbers, which prevented nonprofits and local governments from expensing all eligible costs for reimbursement.

“This funding couldn’t come soon enough,” Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., said. “I’ve visited local aid groups along the border, and they’re near a breaking point.”

Another notable change removes caps on non-congregate shelter like hotels or transportation, which nonprofits argued made it harder to respond to changing flows on the ground and limited their flexibility to respond.

“The funds announced today are needed to help our border communities manage the crisis at the border, and I won’t stop pushing the administration to prioritize Arizona,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who represents nearly all of Arizona’s communities along the border with Mexico, said that while the funding was welcomed, it was not a permanent fix to a federal issue.

“It’s clear that the only path forward to address these issues long-term is real immigration reform to fix our broken system beginning with humane solutions, increased legal pathways, dealing with root causes, and providing more resources and personnel at the border instead of Republicans’ detrimental funding cuts and failed enforcementonly policies,” Grijalva said.

In the past year, the number of migrants crossing through the Arizona border increased dramatically, with the state once again becoming the busiest crossing corridor along the southern

U.S. border with Mexico. The number of apprehensions in Arizona has been dropping week over week, though they typically rise during the summer.

The increase has continued to strain the capacity of border and immigration holding facilities in Arizona. As a result, Customs and Border Protection has been coordinating with nonprofits and local governments to drop off migrants at designated sites after they’ve been legally processed and cleared for release into the country under parole.

In Arizona, CBP has been releasing migrants in Yuma, Tucson, Nogales and Douglas. State and local governments coordinate with nonprofits like Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona, the Regional Center for Border Health and the International Rescue Committee to transport migrants from small communities to larger cities like Tucson and Phoenix.

The humanitarian assistance includes housing, food, medical screenings, and transportation. The majority of migrants released will not stay in Arizona, and instead have relatives and sponsor buy plane or bus tickets to go elsewhere in the United States.

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art ~ our lady of the wall ~ brandon maldonado

https://brandonmaldonado.art/#/nuestra-sra-del-muro/

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old timer chronicle editor ~ rawclyde!

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senator sinema visits border patrol etc.

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by blake herzog

yuma sun

22 aug 2019

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U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema met with members of the Yuma 50 Wednesday to discuss the potential for economic development in the area, after a tour of the Yuma Border Patrol headquarters and Marine Corps Air Station-Yuma.

Congress has been in recess this month, unleashing its members to travel their states or districts. For Sinema it’s the first visit since beginning her first Senate term in January.

“Our first real opportunity to come home and spend some good time at home, I said to my team, I really want to get down to Yuma,” she said at her meeting with the group dedicated to supporting the area’s military installations.

She said she came to see the soft-sided migrant processing facility recently erected next to the Border Patrol station on Avenue A and to tour the Marine base to learn more about what it does and what it needs to continue as a leading flighttraining center.

She said her tour of the Border Patrol’s tent center proved June’s controversial $4.6 billion supplemental funding bill to fund services for migrant families crossing the border — which she supported — was the right action to take.

“I really have to say they’ve done a great job with the additional resources, and managing what has been an almost unmanagable situation,” she said, referring to last spring’s record numbers of migrant families, most from Central America, who clogged immigration agencies’ facilities while trying to escape poverty and violence.

Turning to military matters, she invoked the memory of the late Sen. John McCain, who was known to “protect” Arizona military installations and keep them well-supplied as chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, before dying of brain cancer a year ago.

“No one’s ever going to fill Sen. McCain’s shoes, so I’m just working doubletime to try to keep up with what I believe he would have done,” Sinema said.

Since she’s been in Washington, D.C., for most of her first seven months in office, she’s made sure her staff has been visiting military bases around the state, including Yuma’s.

She said one of her military-related priorities has been to reduce the impact of federal government shutdowns, continuing to cast herself as a centrist and bipartisan figure as she did during her campaign. The last and longest such shutdown lasted 35 days, beginning just before last Christmas.

“Because we live in this really polarizing climate right now, there’s people on both ends of the political spectrum who want to use this as a tool,” she said. “And so those of us who are kind of living in the middle are trying to figure out how to get legislation in place that protects our readiness.”

She is a co-sponsor of that bill with Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin. The two have also paired up on “Operation Safe Return,” an effort to speed up processing of asylum claims by Central American families.

These can drag on for much longer than the 20 days that these families can be detained by immigration enforcement officials, so they are often released into communities while they await their fate.

Some cases, she said, have credible claims for asylum, which can take months to resolve.

“Others who come are economic migrants who don’t qualify for asylum. It’s my hope the administration will engage in this Operation Safe Return, which I proposed with Sen. Johnson, which will help move folks through the process quickly and reunify them with their families, and get them back home,” she said.

This can be done within the 20-day limit with the provisions of the proposal, she said.

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Meanwhile, the Trump administration has announced it will seek to have the “Flores Settlement” rule — which set the 20-day limit on child detentions — to be voided by a federal judge, allowing indefinite detentions of families with children.

“I think that’s unlikely to occur,” Sinema said.

The commanding officers of MCAS-Yuma and Yuma Proving Ground north of the city were there to talk about the missions and capabilities of the bases.

Col. Ross Poppenberger of YPG said the Army’s largest and busiest test center “is kind of the center of gravity for testing for Army modernization, and it’s pretty exciting to be a part of that.

“There’s eight different modernization priorities, cross-functional teams, and we are forefront on six of those eight right now,” he said.

As the discussion turned to economic development, the focus was on bringing aviation and aerospace ventures to the airport, which is adjacent to MCAS.

The idea of creating a “spaceport” for commercial flights into space and the testing that needs to accompany that has been pondered by the Greater Yuma Economic Development Corporation and other groups.

Rick Stilgenbauer, a public policy adviser on the board of the Yuma 50, talked about the progress in getting aerospace-related companies to use the local airspace.

“We already have one significant company (AQST Space Systems Group) that’s located here in Yuma, and there’s others that have been looking around. So SpaceX has been poking around a little bit, as well as another really large company that hopefully we’ll have here really shortly,” Stilgenbauer said.

“They’re coming here regardless of a spaceport. They’d love to have one, but they’re already moving in, and one of the driving forces behind that is (military personnel leaving the service), who are coming off of the base with security clearance, 20 years’ experience with opportunity to work, and we have access to a workforce here that’s second to none in the state,” he said.

Sinema said after the meeting that she’s “very interested in working with the Yuma 50 to try and create a spaceport here in Yuma. I’m on the Aviation and Aerospace Committee of the Senate, and want to ensure we’re bringing more business to Yuma, and develop international space travel. So we’re pretty excited about it.”

She told the group that Washington, D.C., will be consuming her time and energy once the session starts back up, but she intends to maintain a presence here.

“My staff, who is luckier than me, will get to spend a lot of time in Yuma,” she said.

Sinema is the third member of Arizona’s delegation to visit the Border Patrol’s soft-sided facility in as many weeks. She’s also the second to publicly discuss economic development with local leaders in as many weeks.

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Arizona, was in town Aug. 8 to visit the base and Border Patrol headquarters, as well as promote a border detention and asylum reform bill she’s co-sponsoring.

Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Phoenix, came through Aug. 15 to see the headquarters, border facilities at the Port of San Luis, and talked about development with civic leaders and representatives of agriculture and other industries.

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artist

https://www.brandonmaldonado.com/about

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story origin

https://www.yumasun.com/news/sinema-visits-bp-mcas-yuma/article_bd869468-c487-11e9-abe0-b7bb7d3e2f9e.html

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editor

rawclyde

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Ah Shucks, Let’s Go For A Ride

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with

Rawclyde!

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Hop on up

T’is my favorite mode of transportation

Pegasus is a good friend of mine

Come on now

Here

Take my hand

It don’t bite &

Neither does this flying horse

Ah yes

Let’s go

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Flying low flying high

Let’s go find some sky

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Ah yes

Each cloud a smiley face

Each patch of blue endlessly

happy happy

What?

Feeling kind of crappy?

Well well

Let’s go

Find some ghoul

Whose head

You can puke on ’til

he’s drowning in a pool

of disharmony &

We’ll fly away full of

happy happy again

Oh my

We’re higher than all those

puny skyscrapers below

The wind singing awesome songs

We’ve never heard befo’

You’re smiling so much

My goodness

My goddess

You’re smiling so much

So so much my goddess

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Text:

Copyright Clyde Collins 2016

Art:

B&W of Pegasus by Daniel Eskridge