This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.
As the oldest migrant shelter in Tijuana prepares to celebrate its 38-year anniversary this week, its director is scrambling to budget for its continued operation.
Casa del Migrante, an unassuming green and tan building perched on a hillside in the city’s Colonia Postal, has supported people on the move since 1987. This year, according to its director, the Rev. Patrick Murphy, 40% of its budget would’ve come from grants funded through money from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration slashed that funding.
Murphy, 73, known affectionately to many as “Father Pat,” said he’s having to downsize his team.
“Only God knows what will come next,” Murphy said. “The next three years, eight months, I’m not planning on anything good happening.”
Murphy has steered the shelter since 2013, moving from a parish in Kansas that served a Spanish-speaking community largely from Michoacán, Mexico. When he arrived in Tijuana, he found that many of the people he was serving were also from Michoacán, according to reporting at the time from The San Diego Union-Tribune.
When the Rev. Florenzo Rigoni founded the shelter, it primarily served deportees coming back to Mexico, Murphy said. Murphy did a brief stint as acting director of the shelter in the early ’90s and returned in 2013 to run the refuge. Even then, it still mostly received men returning south after the U.S. deported them, he said.
The shelter encouraged the new arrivals to find work and rebuild their lives in Mexico. It still has programs today to help migrants make new homes in Tijuana through job-training classes, but the demographic it serves has shifted dramatically during Murphy’s time at the shelter.
In 2016, Haitians, who had mostly been living in Brazil since a 2010 earthquake demolished much of the infrastructure in their home country, began arriving in significant numbers at the San Ysidro Port of Entry that connects San Diego and Tijuana. Murphy said Mexican immigration officials called him, asking if he could help.
Mexican officials gave out appointment dates to the arriving Haitians, coordinating with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to control how many entered the U.S. each day.
He recalled spending Christmas that year with the shelter full of Haitians, but that moment to him represented a bigger shift. He calls it “when the entire world arrived.”
Who is arriving, and what they encounter when they get to the border, hasn’t stopped changing since then.
“We adapt to the migrant,” Murphy said. “We don’t ask the migrant to adapt to us.”
The Rev. Patrick Murphy is director of Casa del Migrante in Tijuana. (Photo by Kate Morrissey/Capital & Main)Casa del Migrante began primarily helping asylum seekers. Families arrived in Tijuana from southern Mexico and Central America, and adults — mostly men —arrived from African and Asian countries, including Cameroon and Eritrea.
At that time, Casa del Migrante housed only men. Their wives and children would often stay in a shelter up the street called Instituto Madre Asunta.
It was in 2017 that a line of asylum seekers formed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry that wouldn’t disappear until the pandemic closed down asylum processing at the border altogether. Customs and Border Protection officers, in a policy known as “metering,” restricted how many asylum seekers could cross onto U.S. soil. They sent the rest away to wait for another day.
In early 2018, migrants began using a notebook to track who was next in line. Asylum seekers would wait in the growing number of shelters around the city for their turn to request protection. That year, caravans of Central Americans arrived in Tijuana, and Casa del Migrante filled with people from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Murphy said.
The pandemic changed migration patterns again. Murphy said he closed entry to the shelter for about two months and stayed there with about 50 people who decided to wait and see what would happen. The Trump administration used the spread of COVID-19 as its reason to completely stop processing asylum seekers, under a policy called Title 42.
As the world opened back up, Murphy said he decided it was time for the shelter to start taking in full families, not just single men. Casa del Migrante created programs for children and helped its young residents attend school.
As the Biden administration ended Title 42, it introduced a phone application called CBP One that gave out appointments, lottery style, to asylum seekers wanting to cross into the U.S. At the same time, the administration restricted migrants’ ability to win asylum cases if they entered the country without using the app.
“That changed the face of the Casa enormously,” Murphy said. “They come on a Monday. Their appointment was on Thursday, and they would stay, and we’d give the hospitality, and then they go to the appointment, and then that was it.”
On Jan. 20, 2025, a family left Casa del Migrante for a CBP One appointment, but at the port of entry, officials said that all appointments were cancelled. Since then, the Trump administration has closed asylum processing at the border again.
Many have left the shelter, and deportations are more often happening by plane to southern Mexico than on foot over the land border, Murphy said. Witnesses at the Border, a group that monitors deportation flights, reported that the U.S. sent 22 flights to southern Mexico in March.
“Ironically, we were planning to see how we could expand hospitality at the border for all the immigrants that would be deported here,” Murphy said.
Now, he said, it’s time for the shelter to figure out how to adapt again so that it can best serve the people who need it.
“I’ve been knocking on doors of churches and knocking on doors of friends,” Murphy said. “And people have responded well. So that’s the good news. Still, people want to help.”
He stays motivated by the people he serves, especially the children who now live at the shelter, he said.
“I see a good person have success, whether it’s getting a job, a life in Tijuana or crossing the border — it gives me hope that we’re making a difference in people’s lives,” Murphy said.
One man in particular stands out to Murphy.
The man’s brother, who lives in Murphy’s old parish in Kansas, called a few years ago to ask for help. The man had been deported and wasn’t doing well, Murphy said.
With support from Casa del Migrante, the man stabilized his life, found work as a mechanic and was able to rent a place of his own. He still comes to the shelter at night for a meal and to church on Sundays, Murphy said.
“I think he also comes for the companionship,” Murphy said, “and when he’s here, he never fails to come up and shake my hand.”
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