By Karen Gleason
Volunteers are desperately needed to the city’s migrant processing center.
“Things have been really busy. We’ve been receiving hundreds of migrants every day. We offered overnight shelter for the second time at the Joe Ramos Center, and we now have given overnight shelter twice at this (Chihuahua Center) facility,” said Tiffany Burrow, Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition director of operations.
The Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition operates Del Rio’s migrant processing center out of the Chihuahua Neighborhood Facility off Las Vacas Street in south Del Rio.
As Burrow spoke to the 830 Times on Thursday as she expertly prepared a half-dozen ham and cheese sandwiches for a group of Haitian immigrants waiting for a taxi to arrive at the center and ferry them to Del Rio’s Greyhound bus station.
Burrow said the most pressing current need is for local volunteers to help process the migrants being dropped off daily at the center by the Border Patrol.
“Everybody’s afraid of COVID, and these people are not getting tested, so . . . They’re screened through CBP (Customs and Border Protection), but not tested, so people are very hesitant,” Burrow said.
Burrow said speaking Spanish is not a necessity for center volunteers.
“And there are a lot of jobs we need done that are contact-free, like sorting donations. That’s really time-consuming, but it’s done in a back room, and you don’t see anybody,” she said.
Burrow encouraged Del Rioans who’d like to volunteer at the center to visit the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition’s web site at vvbcoalition.com.
“We have a new system in place, where, if they go to the web site and click on the link for those interested in becoming a volunteer, the link goes to a calendar, but they have to sign up on that and they can pick their time they want to volunteer,” Burrow said.
She said the current groups of migrants are mostly first-time border crossers coming from Venezuela and Cuba.
“And then there’s also this continuation of Haitians coming in,” she said.
The volunteers at the center work with each of the migrant families to help them make travel arrangements to their final destinations.
Many of the migrants at the center on Thursday appeared to be family groups or couples.
Alexis Torres, 26, and his wife Mayrele Rivera, also 26, were among those waiting to finalize travel arrangements.
Torres and Rivera are first-time border crossers who are natives of Cuba.
Torres said he is seeking a better life for himself, his wife and their as-yet-unborn first child. Del Rio was a way station on their journey to Dallas, where he said they plan to live with his wife’s brother.
“We only want to live in peace. Cuba is bad, very bad,” Torres said.
