EL PASO, Texas — About a hundred migrants, including a number of women and children, were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last week — and unceremoniously dropped off at an El Paso bus station near the agency, with no money, phones or guidance as to where they should go next.“They didn’t explain anything,” one mother traveling with a small child says. “They just dropped everyone, like garbage.”Local aid organizations scrambled to find food and beds for the migrants.“This is new for us in El Paso,” says Ruben Garcia, who runs Annunciation House, one of the city’s largest migrant shelters.Usually, ICE coordinates with organizations like Garcia’s before releasing migrants from custody with ankle bracelets and future court dates. But because of a recent change in policy, ICE will no longer reach out to aid groups to coordinate assistance every time there’s a release.“What happened last night is that it was the implementation of that policy,” Garcia said the day after the migrants were dropped at El Paso’s Greyhound station.ICE claims that it’s trying to meet court-imposed limits on how long migrants, especially families and children, can be held.In a statement to VICE News, an ICE spokesperson said, “To mitigate the risk of holding family units past the timeframe allotted to the government, ICE began curtailing all reviews of post-release plans from families apprehended along the southwest border starting on Tuesday, October 23.”Garcia’s organization has been assisting about 1,300 migrants a week. But with a surge in migrant families, he’s expecting that number to climb to 1,700 in coming weeks. The day after the 100 migrants were dropped in downtown El Paso he expected two more busloads people. This time, ICE had given him a heads up.“We've been notified that a couple of hours from now, we're going to receive another 80 people here at this site," he said.This segment originally aired Oct. 29, 2018, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
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