00:00:00:03 - 00:00:20:11
Jorge Rodriguez
These disaster after disaster operations that we've been in for the last four years. It doesn't seem like things are as slow down. So it's very hard to try to add something else on top of what everybody's already managing with. And I think there's also changes that we can look at that you even label some of the frameworks as an example.
00:00:20:13 - 00:00:40:08
Jorge Rodriguez
The Stafford Act really sets the foundation for how disasters are managed here. The US, your mass migration is not written so there's certain authorities that are provided to certain federal agencies and all the way down. So there's really no structure for a response.
00:00:40:10 - 00:00:57:15
Kyle King
Welcome to the Crisis Conflict Emergency Management Podcast. I'm your host Kyle. And in this episode we are going to explore a global challenge that transcends mere policy, which is mass migration. Well, delve into how mass migration is shaping emergency management as the next met a crisis. And it's important to differentiate this from what we would call just immigration policy.
00:00:57:15 - 00:01:20:15
Kyle King
For example, while immigration policy often deals with the regulated movement of individuals across borders, mass migration refers to the large scale, often involuntary population movement, driven by factors such as war, natural disasters or economic crisis. These movements create complex challenges, including strains on infrastructure, social tensions and demands on emergency services, which differ fundamentally from the control processes governed by immigration laws.
00:01:20:15 - 00:01:43:19
Kyle King
It's important to also understand that many international organizations are now looking at population movement as key criteria, or their members dates. This includes NAITO, which looks at population movement as one of their key factors towards societal resilience. Our guest today, Laurie Rodriguez, serves as the emergency management coordinator for the El Paso City County Office of Emergency Management, with extensive hands on experience in managing crises from related to mass migration.
00:01:43:19 - 00:02:03:01
Kyle King
The COVID 19 pandemic and domestic terrorism is Insight's come from a place of deep expertise, and El Paso, Texas, stands at the forefront of these issues, rendering this conversation especially relevant and timely. Before we proceed, it is crucial to note that the opinions expressed in this podcast are our own, and we do not represent those of any specific organization or institution.
00:02:03:01 - 00:02:13:14
Kyle King
The show has always been and will continue to be about sharing ideas and experiences, allowing all of us to gain perspective and grow professionally. So let's dive right in and orate. Thank you for joining us today.
00:02:13:14 - 00:02:18:06
Jorge Rodriguez
So thank you. Thank you. Big sign of the podcast. Thanks for having me today. It's about.
00:02:18:09 - 00:02:27:09
Kyle King
It. So this is a wide ranging topic and there's a lot to sort of unpack here. But before we do all that, just maybe a bit of background. How did you get started in emergency management?
00:02:27:11 - 00:02:55:20
Jorge Rodriguez
Sure. Well, I came up through the fire service. I apparently or 24 years ago, then the fire service. But the last seven years I've been deeply steeped in emergency management. Our emergency management program for the city and the county is embedded within the departments. I've served as, as you said, the emergency management coordinator since 2017. I really came into interest back almost a decade ago when all the deepwater oil spill that happened along the Gulf of Mexico.
00:02:55:20 - 00:03:08:14
Jorge Rodriguez
I remember just be fascinated at the moderator, Thad, that that is leadership in that really that's what drew me to the complexity of the issues that emergency management homeland security deal with. So that's really drawn me where I want to be and and that's where I am today.
00:03:08:14 - 00:03:27:09
Kyle King
So that's great. Thanks for that background. And it's really interesting in this particular topic because one of our focuses, at least a lot of the work that we do, we focus on this nexus between what we call crisis conflict and emergency management. And so in this particular lens that I look at this and it might contrast with yours and it probably does, and this is where I think it'll be an interesting discussion.
00:03:27:09 - 00:03:44:22
Kyle King
We look at population movement as a result of conflict. And so some of the things that we're looking at and I'll just use this as just sort of setting the scene for the discussion. We look at the Ukraine, the war in Ukraine and what's happening there, and we look at some of the baselines of the like what NAITO is expecting.
00:03:44:22 - 00:04:04:04
Kyle King
You know, all of the allies to be able to perform. And that includes being able to manage, let's say, 2% of your population, to be able to move within your own borders. Now, in smaller countries that might seem easy enough, but, you know, in a country like the United States with but 330 million people who percent of the population, it could be substantial right now.
00:04:04:09 - 00:04:33:03
Kyle King
You know, unfortunately, we've had some experiences which could probably meet somewhere close to that, such as Hurricane Katrina and things like that. But for the most part, what we've also seen in recent years or since February 2022, is that it's not 2%. It's more like 25, 30, even upwards of 40%, depending on the extent of this disaster, the war or the conflict, whatever the case is, which can cause considerable strain on critical infrastructure, resources and everything else that goes along with that.
00:04:33:06 - 00:04:54:15
Kyle King
As you mentioned, it's like this meter crisis, right, is beyond anything we've ever planned. All the systems and structures, I've been sort of pushed to the limits and beyond to a really interesting conversation because this is coming from like our perspective and the work that we do internationally. But we also want to take the perspective of, you know, you know, individuals like yourself, professionals in the field that are dealing with this in a context that's similar.
00:04:54:21 - 00:05:05:24
Kyle King
But not exactly the same result. So what are some of the challenges you see in terms of emergency management dealing with sort of mass population movement either into their communities or through their communities or anything like that?
00:05:06:01 - 00:05:27:21
Jorge Rodriguez
The complex component of emergency management at the international level I think is very much in your vocabulary. But for us here as a domestic audience member, we think from a local level, we talk about regional state. We haven't necessarily answered our risk profile in terms of whether or not this is something that we should be preparing for and for us being on water as long as we've had mass migration.
00:05:27:21 - 00:05:51:22
Jorge Rodriguez
And really that's started back in 1990. Was it really that big of an issue? But in 2019, here in Alaska, we had our first mass migration. This is primarily family units that were coming from Central America, and it was a long, protracted incident. And when we went around six, seven months and about 120,000 migrants that just passed through our region, what we referred to as the vessel that knocked it.
00:05:51:22 - 00:06:17:02
Jorge Rodriguez
And so that was the first indicator for us that that this might be something that we might be dealing with as a local emergency management program. Best law do 2021. Now, the kind of damage we see a huge spike of encounters at the border across the entire southwest border, and then in 2020, to finally see that inflection point of mass migration again, becoming a big issue for us.
00:06:17:02 - 00:06:37:06
Jorge Rodriguez
And we'll take a deeper dive into those specific steps. But just kind of setting the context of the conversation today. Yeah, it's something that's not on our radar. We did something to help us in our planning and here in the state we put together housing mitigation plans and that's where we do a complete risk and morbidity analysis of all aspects of how to address that.
00:06:37:06 - 00:06:55:20
Jorge Rodriguez
We might be one of the ones that we added as we were up. The plan was mass migration, and here is when we actually saw, like I said, that inflection point of the largest mediterranee crisis odds that it hit a border community, probably a story and never see these levels in the US ever before.
00:06:55:22 - 00:07:18:08
Kyle King
Yeah, I think that's interesting. And so in terms of adding into this dynamic, into your planning process, I'm I'm curious about that. And so what changed because in communities your planning or your own population, right, your community and your citizens and sort of managing a disaster that occurs there and manage any sort of internal population movement, evacuations and whatever the case is now, you're planning for an unexpected factor.
00:07:18:11 - 00:07:37:00
Kyle King
You don't know the numbers of people that might be coming through your community, and that's obviously God. In any planning process, you're going to have sort of the significant, you know, infrastructure, economic and facility and resources constraints that go along with that. So how has this impacted your planning process? I mean, there's lots of parallels there between the work that we do and sort of what you're facing.
00:07:37:00 - 00:07:51:00
Kyle King
It's quite interesting, but you're having to deal with something that is not very quantifiable. I mean, you could look at statistics and metrics and say, well, over five years it's been this number and you could try to plan for that. But at the same time, it's very difficult because it fluctuates quite a bit, I would imagine. What are your thoughts on that?
00:07:51:00 - 00:07:54:07
Kyle King
How's your experience been in sort of the impact on your planning process?
00:07:54:09 - 00:08:18:16
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, the planning, I think, has been our saving grace as we've gone through multiple surges here within the community. But at the same time is one of the most difficult types of events to plan for because you have so many unknowns throughout this last year, as you may be familiar with, there's a public health policy that's called Title 42 that was put in place at the beginning of the pandemic.
00:08:18:18 - 00:08:40:04
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, as that policy was being implemented and there were multiple times where that policy was going to be, it was going to come to an end, but it got tied up in courts and so went back and forth. So for us, it's always a stop and start or a start and stop operation where it's very hard to build capacity when you don't know if the residents going to get pulled out from under your feet.
00:08:40:04 - 00:08:59:16
Jorge Rodriguez
And so across that we began just a long view of it, looking at our plan for it. And we really thought back to our existing policies and procedures, you know, setting long term goals in an action plan, setting out objectives for all of the different impact areas, and just working each one and updating that as we went along.
00:08:59:16 - 00:09:10:20
Jorge Rodriguez
So it helped us organize ourselves, but we've always had to be ready to be able to scale to a number that we just don't know how high we need to scale to. I think that's been our biggest challenge. At what point.
00:09:10:20 - 00:09:32:16
Kyle King
Do you find the tipping point, though? Because I you're trusting and you don't know the number, which is true. I mean, that's very difficult to predict in any of the work that we've seen is just a guesstimate at best on what could possibly happen. So have you been able to, in this planning process, identify the tipping point, for example, where, you know, like this is the critical point, but there's critical mass for us like after this, that something's got to change.
00:09:32:22 - 00:09:59:14
Jorge Rodriguez
That is one of the biggest challenges that we saw from our first incident in 2019. And just to give a little bit more context to that, we had about 120,000 migrants pass to the community. We had a very large NGO capacity at that point during that they had over 30 of what we call hospitality sites set up. And for the most part there was some government intervention to help support the NGO, but it wasn't like anything that we had to do as of last year.
00:09:59:14 - 00:10:20:12
Jorge Rodriguez
So with that context, post pandemic, as you know, most of the NGO operation run on on volunteers and Post-Pandemic, that volunteer basically just completely decimated of retirees. People that have a tough time now are the ones that that are meeting their time to help and or cost. But we had about a dozen 30 shelters down to about a dozen.
00:10:20:12 - 00:10:42:20
Jorge Rodriguez
And the numbers that we saw last year really just made the numbers from 2019 just really looking out of water. And the kind of illustrate is a little bit more in 22 last year, this is by August, right around this time, we began to see in very small trickle of Venezuelan nationals that were coming through the border and started as a triple.
00:10:42:20 - 00:11:08:13
Jorge Rodriguez
So here locally, our exiles will see that they're going to have a capacity about 300 persons that that our process encountered in that and then ultimately released to our NGOs by Customs and Border Protection. That happens every day. That's our steady state and that's not end. But in that period, we began to see a trickling group of insulins that were coming into the community, and they were unique in that they were first generation and migrants coming into us.
00:11:08:15 - 00:11:34:18
Jorge Rodriguez
Most of our previous migrants that come to our region, our officers, they have family members that they're able to connect to. They're able to contact them and they help them with monetary bonds to secure their travel and move on to the final destinations all over the U.S. But last year with small group, which started out pretty innocently, it was a small group of balance island families that were that made the time that at the end itself ended up in our homeless shelters.
00:11:34:20 - 00:11:52:09
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, once we assessed what what their situation was, they said, well, you know, we want to go to New York. They had no means to travel in our system. Zero on the border is not a sheltering operation. It's more of a transportation system because most of the migrants that come to our region, 99%, go on to remain in the Middle passage.
00:11:52:09 - 00:12:12:20
Jorge Rodriguez
So they all move on all of the country. And so this case, we help charter a small bus to New York in that first group and then on the first date to three weeks later, we were going from 300 and went to a thousand. It's coming in. And the meaning at that point so quickly scaled our operation still and our system was completely overrun.
00:12:12:22 - 00:12:42:11
Jorge Rodriguez
That's one of the challenges in planning for this, because this was the first time for us in what, decades of decades of migration coming through, where we had a population that had no means to move on other. So the system became locked up. One of our strategy was to create what we call a welcome center, and that essentially helped us develop what came to be the largest chartering operation that at the U.S. is probably see, during a 45 day period, we operated that center.
00:12:42:13 - 00:13:07:20
Jorge Rodriguez
We moved almost 14,000 migrants to Chicago and to New York, which were their destinations of choice. And all of that was just to keep the system moving. And at that point, as you you're probably familiar with the chartering that's happening at these large cities. We will almost 300 charters network by day period in about 14,000. And so that was our first major surge that we had last year.
00:13:07:22 - 00:13:17:20
Jorge Rodriguez
The context has always changed another surge. And in December of that, that same year, the team with very unique challenges and we can kind of dive into those.
00:13:17:22 - 00:13:31:18
Kyle King
And give a little bit of context to the numbers that you're talking about. So again, if I just use my reference, which is sort of a 2% population movement and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the population of El Paso County is around 680,000. Is that right?
00:13:31:20 - 00:13:41:19
Jorge Rodriguez
Yeah. Yes. So sensitive about that. So we're right around 7000. And then as of as a county where 870,000 updated census numbers.
00:13:41:21 - 00:13:51:23
Kyle King
So you're probably looking and I'm just sort of guessing here, but that's obviously not going to be 2% if you're managing hundred 20,000 an annual basis, correct? I mean, it's annual basis, right?
00:13:52:00 - 00:14:21:08
Jorge Rodriguez
Correct. Well, yes. So you need you a little bit of the data to kind of bring this out a little bit. So when you look at our on that map, our baseline numbers were around 9000 wondering 26 migrants that were coming through our community that was based on that steady state. Right. But 300 a day on it, it added up to that number in other weeks and carried that jumped up to 21,000 migrants that were coming through the community on the on the front end on a lot of London encounters.
00:14:21:09 - 00:14:45:15
Jorge Rodriguez
It went from about 22,000. And by cutters I mean those that those are the migrants that were encountered at the border by this important thing that jumped up from 22000 to 45000 over this period. If we look back to March of of last year, Sydney up May 2022, which was going to be the first time that Title 42 was going to be repeal.
00:14:45:15 - 00:14:56:09
Jorge Rodriguez
And that's what we saw, some smaller surges today where easily at 200,000 migrants that will through the El Paso region since May of last year.
00:14:56:11 - 00:15:15:16
Kyle King
Okay, Wow. That's a lot. So that basically, again, just for context, when we're talking about that type of population movement in Phenix. So we're looking for a sort of more international perspective here. You know, in our sort of standard metric is 2%. Internally, you're managing a 20% population movement through 20 to 25%. It sounds like, through your community with an existing population already.
00:15:15:16 - 00:15:35:24
Kyle King
And so you're having this does flow the population 3 to 20% extra people and sort of coming through your community every year, which I imagine puts tremendous strain on infrastructure and other aspects like that. So how difficult is it to balance the needs of the community versus the need to manage this sort of existential crisis that's happening?
00:15:36:01 - 00:15:56:17
Jorge Rodriguez
Just to give a little bit more context to our region, El Paso is is recently isolated where far west Texas, the next largest jurisdiction is units. We have Albuquerque to the north and they're about 4 hours away in Texas where all of our resources are at advanced level resources now from East Texas, which is easily 810 hours away.
00:15:56:19 - 00:16:26:12
Jorge Rodriguez
And so for us, that's just to start already puts us at a at a disadvantage just because we're a smaller jurisdiction. And at the same time, we don't have these larger metro areas that can help absorb some of the flow. And the Customs and border protection sector is all of southern New Mexico and it runs all the way to about Stockton in far west Texas, very large geographic area, you know, barren it it looks like Mars in some places.
00:16:26:12 - 00:16:57:01
Jorge Rodriguez
The house, everything goes back into El Paso because that's where all the resources and that's where all the transportation of resources are. That's where a lot of NGOs and all of that symbolic place that can handle this flow. And so for us, a balance in the needs of the community and those of the migrants that are coming through as then a town with, to be fair, especially with our first surge that we had last year with the population, there was considerable funding that we had to put upfront as that as a community.
00:16:57:01 - 00:17:24:00
Jorge Rodriguez
We were spending just about 10 million in a 45 day period. We spent about $10 million just to manage that. And fortunately, the federal government, through FEMA, they start providing us funding for the start of operations. And it really that's been the lifeblood for our operations. Just because it is so expensive to manage these types of operations, especially when we scale like we did in December, completely helped us get through all that.
00:17:24:06 - 00:17:44:07
Jorge Rodriguez
And but yeah, and that's something that we take into account is we still have services to provide on site to provide public safety, environmental services and everything out of that is local visits and we'll try to provide. But this added just a whole other layer of difficulty and balancing both, but we were able to do it.
00:17:44:09 - 00:18:07:14
Kyle King
I also want to highlight this is not just like an El Paso issue. This is something that, you know, when there was a European migrant crisis a few years ago, I think that was back in 2019 or 2020. But anyway, that the, you know, 1 million sort of refugees were coming into Europe is still happening every day. I mean, crossing boats from North Africa and then landing on the beaches and sort of around Italy and other countries.
00:18:07:14 - 00:18:32:23
Kyle King
So that's still happening. And as I mentioned previously, the war in Ukraine and other aspects causing mass migration or not even mass migration, but sort of, you know, internal displacement of persons due to conflict as well as, you know, refugees. And so that's something that is just happening all over the world. And so when you're talking about this being a strain on sort of the way you're doing business and, you know, even within the condition of being in El Paso, sort of isolated and things like that.
00:18:33:00 - 00:18:51:21
Kyle King
Now, how are you viewing this as being sort of the next major crisis or mimetic crisis, we might call it, for the emergency management community, especially when we look and start blending in other things such as, you know, climate security, that's coming up and these other drivers of migration that might be happening as well.
00:18:51:23 - 00:19:27:24
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, that's something that I've been searching on and have been presenting on this topic really closely. What happened this last year. For me, I think ability is a bellwether moment. It sounds out of that right now. Some of the largest cities in the US or having a very difficult time with our here in the States when the largest and third largest city in the country are declared a disaster, as we did as the state of Illinois, the state of Texas did, and the state of New York declared disasters or where this, you know, county is the bellwether building.
00:19:28:01 - 00:19:51:15
Jorge Rodriguez
And as the emergency management community, we operate as as local operators. But now we have to open up our perspective to the global climate and all the geopolitical shifts. We saw the impacts and at the beginning of the war with Ukraine, when we saw a lot of migrants moving through California at that point. But then we saw the evacuation of Afghanistan and El Paso.
00:19:51:21 - 00:20:18:15
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, we have Fort Bliss military base here, which became the recipient of about a thousand Afghans. So these things are happening. And now, since the number of migrants that are moving to the US, where we've seen about about 6 million migrants since about February of 2021 that have moved to or apathetic to coming to the United States and a lot of them are buying their asylum.
00:20:18:17 - 00:20:45:22
Jorge Rodriguez
You know, they all have come in for a variety of reasons, economic also leaving, you know, like now it's all up for example, is you probably familiar with this that about 25% of their entire population has left Bosnia to neighboring countries. But also we just saw out migration and shipped it. So quick that our partners in Denver, Denver is directly north of the El Paso, about 12 hours away, and they saw the immediate impact.
00:20:45:22 - 00:21:07:24
Jorge Rodriguez
So they were seeing people coming in really unexpected coming into Denver December of last year. So it's emergency managers really, they broadening our scope and really taking this into account. Emergency medicine is going to play a lead role, especially here. You have these summits, really what happened in New York, what happened in Chicago happened within a two week period.
00:21:08:01 - 00:21:30:17
Jorge Rodriguez
So the ability to scale and sustain those operations, especially at now, is a whole city like Chicago, New York. And the demands are just completely different from what we see here at work. And so that's really what's been trying to bring this to the forefront of the emergency management discussion. Because I don't know, you see management issue, but also there's a lot of homeland security aspects to it as well.
00:21:30:19 - 00:21:48:01
Kyle King
I agree with that. And I think that there is when I started to see through having conversations with professionals like yourselves and sort of working with these subjects on a day to day basis is the fact that we need to evolve in the emergency management space. And I'm just sort of like really thinking to so my opinion could change.
00:21:48:01 - 00:22:10:00
Kyle King
But I think we need to evolve in the emergency management space too, where we start looking at how we go from and these are just my words, but sort of going from emergency management to crisis management and how that applies to governance, right? And so because these decisions are not something we can control, I mean, ultimately at the end of the day, decisions coming out of our national capitals and things like that.
00:22:10:00 - 00:22:39:01
Kyle King
But the impacts are felt in our communities, felt locally and fall upon emergency managers to contain this and then eventually grow into it. Overall crisis that has to be managed before it escalates and gets out of control. And so this is where I do think we need to expand our horizons and our visions about what emergency management is today in 2023, as opposed to sort of the traditional model of just disasters and sort of mitigation and prevention and preparedness.
00:22:39:01 - 00:23:02:04
Kyle King
And I would say largely a more response oriented focus to the day to day sort of disaster and or an earthquake as opposed to like these larger crises that could happen because of a changing environment. I'm not really clear on how that could happen. I think there's a lot of ideas out there still floating around. But have you had any ideas about how we can expand our vision and sort of have these conversations?
00:23:02:07 - 00:23:26:17
Jorge Rodriguez
What's happening with what's transpired over the last three months is just so novel. And the United States historically, I mean, we've seen where there's conflict and you go somewhere in the world and you see large groups not moving to the U.S., but nothing to the scale that we've seen. So I think it's just our imagination hasn't really caught up with the reality of what's happening and not panic by all.
00:23:26:17 - 00:23:54:12
Jorge Rodriguez
Just these disaster after disaster operations that we've been in for the last four years. It doesn't seem like things have slowed down. So it's very hard to try to add something else on top of what everybody's already managing with and the think. There's also changes that we can look at, even labeled sectors and frameworks as an example, the Stafford Act really sets the foundation for how disasters are managed.
00:23:54:15 - 00:24:15:00
Jorge Rodriguez
You're the US, your last migration is not written, so there are certain authorities that are provided to certain federal agencies and all the way down. So there's really no structure for a response. Something like this. And the way that it's managed, it's been managed differently. It had at every city that's been that happened. So most of our along the border community, we have a great network.
00:24:15:00 - 00:24:33:20
Jorge Rodriguez
We're all approaching the issue very, very differently within ourselves. A lot of similarities, a lot of best practices. But I think it's just really building a market framework. You said, I think getting beyond just the natural disasters and looking at some of these new enterprises that we have to catch up on and really start looking at where it was.
00:24:33:22 - 00:24:49:23
Kyle King
I think one issue that we have is it yeah, it's it's unparalleled in terms of sort of these events happening, but they just keep coming. So you had obviously the pandemic and then you have a supply chain crisis and then you get into a mass migration crisis and then you I mean, these things just keep coming and coming.
00:24:49:23 - 00:25:07:16
Kyle King
And I don't think that that is going to change in the near future. And in fact, what I tend to see more now is that even though there, say, on a global scale, there's an initiative to sort of become a bit more isolated on an international sort of scale and try and get her to a safer space. And we're all contained in our environments.
00:25:07:16 - 00:25:33:09
Kyle King
I think we are far too interconnected now and that we're not going to be touched by global environments and crises. I mean, could pandemics showed that in multiple fronts, then the migration crisis in Europe and then throughout the Balkans and then even in North America is the same the same issue that we're all dealing with. So I don't think we can escape any of these as isolated incidents, but at the same time, we can learn from what's happening in other countries and sort of see what people are doing because, you know, there's no plagiarism in good ideas.
00:25:33:09 - 00:25:52:14
Kyle King
Right. I think some of the challenges are low. But I made one point which I wanted to touch on really quick, is that it is also interesting the fact that you're having this 20% change in a community population who are uninformed about the risks and the hazards of your community, who are also then possible, you know, who are exposed to sort of the risks in your community.
00:25:52:14 - 00:26:01:03
Kyle King
And so now they can become victims of something. So you had an earthquake or whatever happens. And so your entire planning premises are changing almost on a daily basis.
00:26:01:03 - 00:26:22:10
Jorge Rodriguez
Yeah, it's always, always changing with it. We played a big role of providing isolation, quarantine, shelter for a lot of the migrants that were when we got to the community that in itself created such a level of complexity dealing with migration issue settings, the challenges with putting people together. You know that with the disease like COVID really brought down a lot of capacity.
00:26:22:15 - 00:26:55:03
Jorge Rodriguez
And so those are some of the things that, you know, we had challenges with. What a challenge for us as a local jurisdiction that preceded the surges that we saw in 2022 was hard. And I like to connect them because I think they're all related. After our 2019 surge that we had. But a month later, after the numbers anticipated, we had a domestic terrorism event where we had an individual that came from the Dallas region, drove to El Paso and committed a heinous act.
00:26:55:05 - 00:27:23:07
Jorge Rodriguez
We lost 23 of our community members. Seven Mexican nationals were part of that. We had 25 others that were severely injured. And in the manifesto, the perpetrator, he stated that he was going to put a stop essentially to this Hispanic invasion into our community. El Paso is made up of 85% Hispanics and a lot of the national media attention that we were receiving during that first surge in 2019 all played a part in it.
00:27:23:07 - 00:27:43:04
Jorge Rodriguez
But as we jump forward and we look at the at these incidents of last year, the surges that we saw this during May, we're ending up Title 42. There's not only just a homeland security concern for domestic actors, bad actors that have animus against what they're seeing. I guess this type of migration that's coming through to some more.
00:27:43:06 - 00:28:05:09
Jorge Rodriguez
And there's actors and I just sat through a brief with our Metro Warbirds were monitoring some of these bad actors that were putting derogatory information on social media, you know, wanting to commit acts of violence. So not only was this that is of like a positive feedback loop, right? Where the more mass migration you have, the more height, the more people become agitated for what's happening.
00:28:05:11 - 00:28:33:01
Jorge Rodriguez
And some of that can carry over to some type of heinous act that we saw here in 2019. So that has been in our mindset after that shooting that we were always a potential target for these actors. And as this generated last year due to the surges that we saw, our security presence was very much part of our operation, not just to protect our citizens, but also for the large congregate settings that we had for for the migrants.
00:28:33:01 - 00:28:59:00
Jorge Rodriguez
So we really worked closely with all of our intelligence agencies here in the region, our fusion center, our local, state, federal law enforcement agencies to make sure that we had eyes on happening. But that potential was always there. And so that I think, is a completely other element of complexity that that's added to mass migration just because of the political fervor and rhetoric that we see, I think becomes a huge challenge.
00:28:59:02 - 00:29:27:16
Kyle King
Well, absolutely. These are things that sort of the network effects are systemic effects of this kind of rapid explosion of population in your community. Right. These are things that are just going to happen because that's the effects of it when something like that occurs. And I don't think you can escape those. But I am curious, though, in terms of if those experiences both with that terrorist incident, but then also in terms of the mass migration issues and the population movement issues, has that changed your approach in terms of talking with the public then?
00:29:27:18 - 00:29:52:04
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, absolutely. And that was a big part of our strategies, was providing regular then being out on the border. Very difficult to wrap your head around as to why this is happening, why there's hundreds of people outside sleeping on the street, which we saw in December 2022. You know, there's just a lot of complex issues that it took for us as the operators to understand, much less our community.
00:29:52:04 - 00:30:12:07
Jorge Rodriguez
So that that was a part of our communication efforts was to try to inform what we were doing, what was happening and what the future was going to look like. And we were in the national spotlight during the concert with the band, with the frontlines. And then in the summer of 2020 of where the numbers just again showed up, we were seeing about 50,000 encounters that December.
00:30:12:07 - 00:30:33:12
Jorge Rodriguez
That's the highest level of obviously here on the border. And we had about 30,000 releases during the month of December in what are we we were seeing about 10,000 migrants being released within the El Paso community. So the whole system was completely overwhelmed. We had hundreds of migrants that had come across what we call and process they had and presented themselves to Customs Border Protection.
00:30:33:12 - 00:31:03:18
Jorge Rodriguez
So then they came across legally and they saw sanctuary at a local church in downtown El Paso. And these images were projected all over state, local, federal and international media were here. And to have people understand is I pulled up these groups of individuals, that one sponsor is a local committee we had assist them because all of our federal funding is tied to only working with migrants and then legally processed and released by Customs and Border Protection.
00:31:03:20 - 00:31:20:16
Jorge Rodriguez
So that's all those nuances that we try to communicate and do what we could as best we can to make the incident and really help those that were on the streets working with our faith based organizations, our NGOs that did have capacity. And we were able to leverage some of those resources to get some of those folks off the street.
00:31:20:18 - 00:31:25:00
Jorge Rodriguez
So, yeah, I mean, that's just again, the layers of complexity to this issue.
00:31:25:02 - 00:31:40:09
Kyle King
As we do in most of the podcast. We talk about the local impact, some of these issues, and then we sort of go out and say, what does the future hold for us in terms of these sort of issues? And so we've talked a lot about the local impact in your region, in your community, in terms of the population movement issue.
00:31:40:09 - 00:31:48:22
Kyle King
What are you foreseeing in the future, say, in the next five or ten years? And then I'll just caveat that by saying what should emergency managers be doing today or their own community?
00:31:48:24 - 00:32:11:13
Jorge Rodriguez
Well, I think as long as geopolitical your previous podcast now that was a lot of references to climate and those that actually I think we are looking at within this next decade where this is going to continue to be a challenge that is have global impacts like especially you're on the border, you know what, we're always going to be at the frontline of this by any jurisdiction.
00:32:11:13 - 00:32:31:17
Jorge Rodriguez
Now the United States can easily become the next New York, the next Chicago. And as you know, Washington, DC was also receiving Denver has been receiving and then assigned elders as late as interceding. So right now migration, which makes it probably one of the biggest challenges is that it can be both and change from one week to the next.
00:32:31:17 - 00:32:49:10
Jorge Rodriguez
And that as migrants come through Mexico, with Texas providing and then doing a lot more border security as this has become was once was, was the primary point of entry for most migrants coming into the country. Now it's one of the most difficult. So a lot of those ship migration that we will let right now, there's always the busiest sectors.
00:32:49:10 - 00:33:13:04
Jorge Rodriguez
And so that I think for us is being prepared. You know, looking at all of your hazards and threats, but also taking this into consideration because your jurisdiction is going to be having those conversations with your leadership, having conversations with your NGOs because they play a critical role in managing these types of operations, I think really is just something we as emergency management, as crisis leader is really need to start.
00:33:13:04 - 00:33:32:09
Jorge Rodriguez
And it was a conversation where it goes, I don't know. I don't know what we're going to be, but the flow continues and there's new policies at the federal government stealing to create different pathways and still try to meet the needs of these people that are coming from all over the world due to conflict, due to a multitude of factors there.
00:33:32:09 - 00:33:53:08
Jorge Rodriguez
Their best hope is continues to be the United States. And for us as a global player, it's just now what's going to be our role in that and know that comes at a much higher level, right it from the federal government side all the way down to the local. But these are federal challenges, global challenges that really end up coming all the way back down to.
00:33:53:10 - 00:34:09:11
Kyle King
Yeah, I agree. And I think just to close out on that, I just want to highlight this. I just ran the numbers really quick and it's fascinating to sort of have this international perspective, but then apply it to like your community and you are dealing with in your community. You're dealing with like Ukraine war level population movement and your community.
00:34:09:11 - 00:34:29:01
Kyle King
I don't think people really understand that or connect the dots between the two, because if you just run the numbers, you're roughly in the same category. There's 20 to 25% of population movements where your community is on parallel with what's happening in war regions throughout much of the rest of the world. I think people don't necessarily correlate that and understand the impact of that on communities.
00:34:29:01 - 00:34:50:24
Kyle King
And so while you're talking about, yes, of course, this is the long term, we don't know what's going to happen. But I think people need to appreciate the impact on our communities by this massive population movement. It doesn't go unnoticed right. So I think that's something that these conversations are always fascinating for me to try and to connect it to, because we think in one way and then we look at our communities and say, Wow, this is really on a scale that I just didn't even think about.
00:34:51:03 - 00:35:13:20
Jorge Rodriguez
Yeah, that's something that we try to also make it as best we can and the scale of scope of what's happening, it's historic. It's completely unprecedented. The trajectory hasn't changed. And, you know, like radiation as it has been for decades, it's it's always there. It's seasonal, you know, every spring that we would see taken in migration because that's the best time to travel.
00:35:13:20 - 00:35:29:23
Jorge Rodriguez
And so we've seen this for decades year long border. The but at this point now with with the numbers that we've seen so far and settlements consistently and they haven't abated know this is now the new trajectory of mass migration the that states.
00:35:30:00 - 00:35:52:13
Kyle King
Something we definitely have to think about in population movement being one the next met a crisis for the emergency management community. So that's all the time we have for today's episode of the crisis. Kind of like The Birds made of a podcast. I want to give you a huge thanks to our guest, Henry Rodriguez, for his time and sharing his valuable insights about the impact of mass migration as an emergency manager and also as emerging management's next met crisis.
00:35:52:16 - 00:36:09:12
Kyle King
It's truly an honor to have you on the show and to hear about your experiences and to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future episodes, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on our website or via social media. I'm generally on LinkedIn all the time, and if you like the topics and the discussion, please share and leave a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:36:09:14 - 00:36:14:15
Kyle King
Until next time, stay safe and thanks for joining us today. It was really nice having you here.
00:36:14:15 - 00:36:15:00
Jorge Rodriguez
Thank you.
