SAN ANTONIO -With San Antonio’s central Migrant Resource Center closed, migrants are turning to local churches, nonprofit organizations and nearby neighbors to help guide them with their next steps.
For more than two years, the old CPS energy building served as a temporary home for asylum-seeking migrants. The City of San Antonio decided to no longer accept new arrivals in February 2025. The decision to close the center came as a wave of new federal immigration policies, which included the ending of legal protections for migrants of Venezuela and other foreign countries took hold.
The sudden policy shift created a drop in local operational needs. City Manager Erik Walsh explained during an official press briefing the center had seen its daily intake decrease to about a dozen migrants per day. At the peak of operations, the center functioned as a massive transit hub, processing over 1,400 newly arrived migrants every day.
“The migrant traffic started to change at the border […] the migrant traffic started to dwindle and the number of buses started to decrease,” said Eric Cooper, President and CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank. “It wasn’t that there weren’t any migrants coming, but there’s an escalating level of enforcement that created a lot of fear.”
The closing of the city’s $34 million operation highlighted a shift in how border arrivals were managed, moving away from local response centers as federal enforcement and policy heightened.
With the 700-bed facility’s door closed, asylum seekers must navigate without city support. Many of these migrants are continuing their journey to reach family or find travel connections to their final destination. They rely heavily on non-profits to supply basic necessities before traveling onward.
Cooper stated that while the decrease in arrivals made the center unsustainable, the underlying help for migrants never vanished. San Antonio’s response to the migrants did not begin at the resource center, but months earlier. The Food Bank began helping families dropped off in the late night at the downtown Greyhound bus station. Their response led to the opening of a small resource center in a nearby vacant Quiznos restaurant. During the entire duration of aid, local non-profit networks nourished roughly 300,00 migrants passing through.
Throughout the center’s operation, the San Antonio Food Bank served as a vital lifeline, relying on private donations and community volunteers to help supply breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack daily. Beyond operational support, Cooper spoke about the importance of eliminating stereotypes surrounding asylum seekers.
“People have stereotypes or assumptions of a migrant,” Cooper explained, stating that some arrivals were educated professionals, including doctors, schoolteachers and administrators. These asylum seekers were fleeing violent conflict, economic collapse and dictatorships of their home countries.
To offer a comfortable experience to families going through these grueling journeys, the Food Bank partnered with local citizen originating from countries like Afghanistan, the Republic of Congo and Haiti. These community members helped prepare recipes that were culturally familiar to the asylum seekers, even using their traditional spices. “Food is nourishment, calories and energy […] but it’s love, hope, culture and family,” Cooper said.
Support for asylum seekers caught national attention, Cooper clarified that it was a minor fraction of the workload done by the Food Bank. “On a weekly basis, we feed now 140,000 people a week and migrants at best were three to four percent of that,” Cooper stated. “A small percentage of who we feed were migrants.
For local organizations now carrying the pressure, the closure of the Migrant Resource Center was not the end of the story. As federal policies shift and city support scales back, the strain on these organizations will continue to grow.
Yet Cooper views this ongoing responsibility as a continuation of the city’s tradition of hospitality, speaking on the city’s assistance with evacuees and displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey.
“I think America has this light on the hill, it’s a beacon of hope, a place of respite and refuge,” Cooper said. “We’ve had such a tradition in our city of doing that […] it was just such an honor and privilege to be able to provide that type of respite and nourishment.”
Cooper noted that local organizations rely on four pillars from the community; Food donations, financial contributions, volunteer time and public advocacy. As the San Antonio Migrant Resource Center’s doors remain closed, those four pillars can help guide the San Antonio Community to care for those in need.
For more information regarding volunteering or donations to the San Antonio Food Bank visit https://safoodbank.org/ways-to-help/.
