ICE Continues To Release Asylum-Seekers At Public Park In El Paso, Texas

Recently released from ICE custody, migrants form a line to board a bus that will take them to a shelter on Christmas Day.

Monica Ortiz Uribe / NPR

For the third day in a row, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials released hundreds of migrant asylum-seekers at a park near a bus station in downtown El Paso. The comparisons to Mary and Joseph wandering the roads of Bethlehem seeking shelter are unavoidable for dozens of volunteers who have stepped in to help. Especially on Christmas Day.

“I kept having the phrase go through my head last night, ‘There’s no room at the inn, we’ve got to make some,’” Kathryn Schmidt, a social worker who co-founded the Borderland Rainbow Center, an LGBTQ community center, told NPR.

“I grew up Catholic… So it seemed like a no-brainer. There are people who are hungry, who don’t have a place to stay….and it’s Christmas,” Schmidt added.