PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Another bus carrying migrants who were sent from Texas arrived at 30th Street Station Monday — the sixth in less than three weeks. Numerous community organizations are taking turns to help them in their transition.
Monday’s bus arrived around 6 a.m., the latest to come to Philadelphia since mid-November.
“Each of the buses, the migrants have arrived pretty scared. They don't totally understand who we are at first. So they're pretty weary; they're also exhausted,” said HIAS Pennsylvania Executive Director Cathryn Miller-Wilson.
“The third or fourth bus, there were a few men actually, grown men who stepped off the bus and realized who everyone was at 30th Street and burst into tears...the gratitude is pretty amazing.”
About 50 people were transferred to a SEPTA bus Monday and taken to a welcome center that the city has set up on Luzerne Street in North Philadelphia.
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HIAS Pennsylvania is one of three groups that rotates in helping explain critical legal information to the asylum seekers, said Miller-Wilson.
“They've all been what's known as ‘paroled’ into the country, which means that they've been interviewed by border guards and have been permitted to enter in order to seek further legal relief,” she said.
But she added that once they’re eligible for that legal relief, they file a petition to get them authorized to work. However, as excited as they are, the process has highlighted the problem of the delay in workers’ authorization for immigrants, Miller-Wilson said.
“Even though they are eligible for that relief, and even once they file that petition, it can take months to get that work authorization,” she said.
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“When you bring in numbers of people and say, ‘You're allowed to be here, you're allowed to petition, but you're not allowed to support yourself,’ that just puts the burden on everybody.”
Miller-Wilson added they warn migrants about people looking to wrongfully take advantage of them, at a time when they’re vulnerable and new to the country.
She added that other community organizations have helped with getting them to their families, providing them with food, clothes, and shelter, and a few times, taken them around Philadelphia to welcome them to our city.
Miller-Wilson estimates that about 20 of the migrants who have traveled on the six buses are staying in the Philadelphia area.