D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a public emergency Thursday in response to the thousands of migrants who are being sent to the city by bus from Arizona and Texas. At a press conference inside the Wilson Building, she also announced the creation of a government office that is tasked with supporting new arrivals who seek asylum and coordinating the local response.

The time-limited emergency declaration offers Bowser and her administration more power and flexibility, immediately, meaning officials will be able to mobilize people and resources faster and seek federal financial assistance. It’s a declaration she’s exercised to more nimbly manage the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Florence.

“We’re putting in place a framework that would allow us to have a coordinated response with our partners,” Bowser said Thursday. “This will include a program to meet all buses, and given that most people will move on, our primary focus is to make sure we have a humane, efficient, welcome process that will allow people to move on to their final destination.”

The new Office of Migrant Services will be housed within the Department of Human Services, Bowser continued, and will provide basic needs to arriving migrants, including meals, transportation, urgent medical care, and transportation to connect people to resettlement services. Bowser will allocate $10 million to establish and support the new office. She will seek reimbursement for part of at funding through FEMA.

Bowser also said she will send emergency legislation to the D.C. Council to codify the new office. While the public emergency lasts 15 days, Bowser said, she will also be sending a request to the council to extend the emergency.

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D.C. has effectively become a border town, according to nonprofits and volunteers supporting the migrants, ever since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started busing people to the nation’s capital in April to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies. (As Bowser put it Thursday, “they want to make a point to the federal government.”) Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey have so far sent hundreds of buses carrying nearly 11,000 people to D.C., according to media reports, and have expressed no intentions of stopping. While most migrants leave D.C. for another state, mutual aid volunteers and nonprofit staff greeting new arrivals at Union Station weekly estimate 10 to 15 percent of people decide to stay local because they have nowhere else to go.

Bowser criticized the Republican governors for political games and called on the federal government to lead the response to the “growing humanitarian crisis.” Consequently, she’s repeatedly asked the U.S. Department of Defense to activate D.C.’s National Guard. However, the feds have denied each request, in part because the guards have no training or experience for the requested mission.

“Regardless of the federal response — which I think has been lacking in some respects — that the District of Columbia would continue to work with partners to advance what we need and ensure our systems in D.C. are not broken by a crisis that is certainly not of our making,” Bowser said Thursday.

Meanwhile, staff with SAMU First Response and volunteers with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network continue to provide immediate and long term support to migrants, respectively, once they are dropped off at Union Station. Both groups have called the infrastructure they’ve created unsustainable. SAMU receives federal FEMA dollars to offer food and transportation to new arrivals, as well as short-term emergency shelter that’s largely reserved for women and children. Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network has provided immediate care like SAMU, as well as resettlement resources because migrants looking to reside in the D.C. region have no family or friends in the U.S. to rely on and are not legally allowed to work.

Bowser said her administration would continue to use the hotels for sheltering migrant families. Department of Human Services Director Laura Green Zeilinger, who attended the presser, told DCist/WAMU she expects to use the quarantine hotel for capacity reasons, but specified families are on different floors and thus separated from rooms used for quarantine. According to Zeilinger, 348 migrants are staying at these hotels.

Many mutual aid volunteers have criticized the Bowser administration for punting responsibility to the federal government and for declining to recognize or adequately support migrants who are staying in D.C. Bowser has offered hotel rooms to migrant families looking to reside in D.C. However, one of those hotels is already being used for COVID-19 quarantine and thus migrants live there under very strict rules. Migrants also don’t have access to some of the services unhoused residents staying in family shelters do, including case managers who can help them navigate the social safety net.

“While we are happy to see Bowser take an interest in supporting migrants being bused to DC, she is five months too late,” said Bianca Vazquez of Beloved Community Incubator, a group a part of the mutual aid network, in a statement sent to DCist/WAMU on Thursday. “By abdicating their responsibility for so long, the DC government helped create this humanitarian crisis.”

“Mayor Bowser announced that she is setting up a system that is distinct from the homelessness services system to address migrant needs,” said Madhvi Bahl from Sanctuary DMV and the Mutual and Network, in a statement to DCist/WAMU. “We await the details of this plan and hope it includes transitional housing, case managers, and other resources that will provide migrants with long-term stability. In the meantime we will continue to show up for our neighbors and welcome them with dignity.”

A managing director at SAMU, Tatiana Laborde, who participated in Thursday’s press conference declined to criticize the local government response to the crisis when asked about it. She said her team and the Bowser administration have been “working together since Day One.” She welcomed the emergency declaration and government office to support migrants, saying that 10 buses come once per week. Her team, also present at Thursday’s press conference, had just welcomed a bus that morning.

Bowser declined to offer a timeline to establish the new office, saying only that officials were working “expeditiously” on it.

This post has been updated with additional information from Bowser’s Thursday press conference, as well as statements from mutual aid volunteers. It has also been updated to correct that the emergency is a public emergency, not a public health emergency.