OAN Staff James Meyers
4:26 PM – Tuesday, April 1, 2025
A massive migrant shelter in San Diego, California, is closing its doors as the city has seen a significant drop in asylum seekers since President Donald Trump returned back to the White House.
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According to CBS8 News San Diego, the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Mission Valley is reportedly returning back to normal hotel operations — and it will no longer be run as a migrant shelter.
Reports indicated that the migrant shelter had been run by Catholic Charities, Fox News reported.
The latest migrant shelter closure also comes after the Jewish Family Service of San Diego announced in February that it was closing its center, in addition to laying off 115 employees due to “changes in federal funding and policy.”
“Jewish Family Service of San Diego (JFS) is working to meet the evolving needs of the community in response to recent and anticipated federal policy changes,” the organization previously said. “With a deep commitment to its core value of ‘Welcome the Stranger,’ JFS is focusing its immigration efforts on providing pro bono legal services and community support resources.”
The shelter had operated in San Diego County as a regional migrant shelter for more than six years — prior to its closure.
The non-governmental organization (NG) announced that it has not received any additional asylum-seeking families or illegal alien individuals, since the Biden administration’s “CBP One” app was no longer in use. In 2023, the app’s “features” were expanded even more, to allow migrants to make an appointment at a port of entry to be allowed in, initially due to an exception from the Title 42 public health order.
Meanwhile, U.S. Border Patrol agents have announced that, since February, under the Trump administration, “migrant encounters have decreased” by a staggering “95%.” According to the Los Angeles Times, arrests have also gone from more than 1,200 per day under Biden, compared to the Trump administration, whose “peak” last April was only 30-to-40 per day.
“To say there has been a dramatic change would be an understatement,” Jeffrey Stalnaker, acting chief patrol agent of the San Diego sector of the border, told the newspaper outlet.
At the end of December, over 936,000 migrants made appointments to be paroled via the app, according to Customs and Border Protection.
“With migrants no longer able to use the CBP One application, the San Diego Rapid Response Network (SDRRN) Migrant Shelter Services, operated by JFS, has not received new asylum-seeking families and individuals released from short-term federal custody into our care. Due to these changes in federal funding and policy, the SDRRN Migrant Shelter Services will be paused until there is better understanding of future community needs,” the statement continued.
In 2024, the SDRRN received $22,077,365 in taxpayer-funded FEMA money, despite previously claiming they didn’t receive any funds — according to grant records on the FEMA website.
Meanwhile, other cities across the nation have closed down their migrant shelters as well, including Denver, which closed four migrant shelters while announcing at the time that it would “consolidate shelters with the goal of saving the city millions of dollars.”
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