Eerie scenes in Arizona show the border wall deserted after Title 42 expired trends now
The United States on Friday ended a COVID-19 border restriction that had blocked many migrants at the border with Mexico, triggering a scramble to enter during the night that had evaporated by sunrise.
A holding area by the border wall outside Yuma, Arizona, that was filled with lines of migrants on Thursday night was empty at dawn.
The only reminder of a surge in arrivals as the clock ticked down to the Title 42 deadline was a dumpster filled with discarded water bottles and a mess of footprints in the sand.
Local officials said everyone — from Border Patrol agents to migrants and the cartels that control people smuggling operations — was trying to understand what came next after the end of Title 42 and the introduction of slew of new regulations.
'I anticipate that people are still trying to figure out what this means and how this will play out,' said Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines.
This was the scene on Friday morning close to the border wall outside Yuma, Arizona. It was deserted. Some 24 hours earlier the line of migrants waiting to be process was 300-strong
Predictions of chaos also failed to come true in other border cities, such as El Paso, Texas.
However, that does not mean the crisis is over. Days of surging migration have pushed holding facilities way beyond capacity.
Officials told DailyMail.com that border detention facilities have maxed-out holding as many as 28,000 people as numbers detained at the border surpassed 10,000 a day.
Border cities say they cannot keep with processing arrivals, screening them and allocating court dates for their asylum claims to be heard.
The city of Yuma was preparing to release more than 140 migrants on to the city's streets on Friday in order to relieve pressure on the processing system — the first such releases in two years.
Thursday night brought a fresh surge in arrivals on the Arizona border. A big group of Peruvians rounded the edge of the border wall with an hour to spare before the end of Title 42.
They were followed 45 minutes later by another big group. They included dozens of young men at Senegal who arrived at a run.
Even after Title 42 expired, they kept trickling in. At one point more
