Migrant mothers, children living in tents in San Diego amid shelter shortage

From inside her tent, Luz Vasquez watched with weary eyes as her son bounced about the playground outside. Between glances, she folded her kids’ clothes neatly into a suitcase. 

“They have more fun (here) because at the shelter they don’t play or anything,” she said Tuesday. 

Vasquez and her two sons, ages three and six, have been living at a San Diego park for two weeks since getting kicked out of a local homeless shelter. They arrived in San Diego almost a year ago after fleeing starvation in Venezuela. 

Now, they are among a group of migrants, including families with young children, living in about a dozen tents at the park, whose location inewsource is not disclosing because of safety concerns from mutual aid volunteers. Volunteers said they first noticed the encampment in May.

In recent months, asylum-seekers and other migrants have joined the thousands of unhoused San Diegans living on the sidewalks, in parks or in the shadows of freeway underpasses.

While the exact number of homeless migrants is unknown, what is clear is an increasingly desperate reality for some of the most vulnerable people living in the community.

That includes unhoused Americans. The San Diego region has struggled to prevent more people from becoming homeless. Each month for the past two years, more people in the county have lost housing than those who manage to find it.

San Diego is also direly short on housing – a fact that has helped to drive up the cost of living and cast the region’s most vulnerable onto the streets. Meanwhile, the city’s homeless shelter system remains more than 90% full.

The migrant tent encampment is the “consequence of the lack of resources and insufficient safety net to prevent people from falling into this situation,” said Pedro Rios, program director with the American Friends Service Committee. 

inewsource spoke with several migrant families and individuals who have lived in San Diego anywhere from a few months to now more than over a year. Some are living in tents on the street, others in local homeless shelters or churches and others in their vehicles. 

Even though Vasquez didn’t think she’d be sleeping on the street, she’s grateful to be in the U.S. She wants to accomplish the dream that has driven many to flee her home country in recent years. 

“To work, buy yourself a house, help your family that stayed in Venezuela,” she said. 

But that dream is increasingly challenging, for both American citizens and recently arrived migrants, in one of the country’s most unaffordable cities.

Ismaelys Escalona, another Venezuelan mother living at the park, said she planned to rent a place to live for herself and her three-year-old son once they arrived in the U.S., but she can’t find a daycare for him and paying a deposit for a room on top of living expenses hasn’t been possible so far, she said. 

“I can’t buy diapers and all that,” she said.

Many of the migrants who spoke to inewsource for this story entered the country with appointments through CBP One, a government phone app which since May 2023 offers one of the only options for migrants to enter the country without being barred from asylum. Others crossed outside legal ports of entry. All had been processed, documented and released by immigration authorities.

However they arrived, migrants in San Diego are facing a shortage of resources as they attempt to establish themselves in a country with a new language and culture. 

Today, there are significantly fewer shelter beds for migrants available than a year ago. Migrant respite shelters operated by Catholic Charities of San Diego, which once could house up to 1,600 people at a time across San Diego and Imperial counties, was forced to cut its capacity in half last year after losing a major source of funding. 

A county funded “Welcome Center” that provided recently released migrants with transitional services, abruptly closed in February after money for the program ran out earlier than expected. 

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to use nearly $14 million in federal funding for another migrant resource center and is expected to pick an operator for the program this month. The exact timeline of the center’s opening is unclear. 

Some migrants are instead turning to resources for San Diego’s unhoused population for help. 

The City of San Diego Homelessness Response Center received more than 1,000 requests for help from individuals who identified as migrants between September and May, according to Tyler Renner, senior director of communications for PATH, one of the agency’s operating the center. 

PATH started tracking requests from migrants in September after sometimes “overwhelming” numbers of them asking for help. The home countries of the migrants included Afghanistan, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Somalia and Venezuela, Renner said. 

As of early June, around 130 migrants were staying in shelter beds in San Diego managed by Alpha Project, a homeless resource nonprofit. 

Father Joe’s Villages, another homeless shelter provider, said through a spokesperson that it was housing 52 families as of May. They do not ask residents about their immigration status, the spokesperson said.

Keynis Torres, a 29-year-old Venezuelan mother, was one of them. That month, she stood outside the East Village shelter, eyes swollen from crying. She and her two-year-old were kicked out after a fight with another resident, she said. 

“As a mother, I felt suffocated. I felt like I can’t work, I can’t give my son what he needs to make it worth it to come to this country,” Torres said. 

Fleeing starvation and authoritarianism in her home country, Torres crossed the Darién Gap, the infamously dangerous jungle connecting South and Central America, when her son was just 5 months old. 

Now in San Diego, Torres said she’s had trouble keeping a job while caring for her son, who has autism and who doesn’t do well in the shelter’s daycare. She spent much of what she saved over months on a hotel room while she was barred from the shelter. 

Torres is back in the shelter for now, but she said the challenges have continued. 

One volunteer has been trying to find housing for a 30-year-old man from Morocco since February. He lived at her house briefly, then at the airport. Tuesday morning, two aid volunteers helped the man set up a tent at the park alongside other migrants. 

“That can’t be a solution,” said Ruth Mendez, another volunteer helping migrants at the park.  

Volunteers can sometimes find temporary solutions for especially vulnerable migrants, but they worry that those in the park could be subject to the city’s controversial camping ban, which could allow police to ticket migrants for living in the park or otherwise displace them. 

Mendez worries the situation will worsen before local leaders respond. In the meantime, they are failing both migrants and unhoused Americans, Mendez said. 

“When is it going to be something that they pay attention to?” she said. 

For now, Vasquez said she and her boys will keep sleeping at the park until they can get their own room to live in. 

Taking a break from playing, Vasquez’s six-year-old son said he doesn’t like living there, but things will be better once they have a home. His family has promised him new toys. 

“There I’ll be okay,” he said. “They are going to buy everything from Spiderman and Tony (Stark), too.”