Reluctantly taking a page from Governor Greg Abbott’s busing playbook is the city of El Paso, which last month began sending its own busloads of illegal migrants to New York City.
El Paso, like most of the other American cities and towns on the Mexican border, has been struggling to deal with the huge influx of “asylum-seeking” migrants this year, in its case at least 900 per day. Finally, late in August, with local shelters and resources maxed out and the announcement that a group of 500 Venezuelan migrants were going to be dumped onto the city’s streets otherwise, the city government relented and chartered another a bus for New York City.
The city’s NYC-bound busing project had actually begun the previous week, on August 23, but city officials that week had thought that to be a one-off event. They were wrong. The daily 900 kept coming.
Now the otherwise migrant-friendly city fathers are a bit shamefaced about it all and have been quick to dissociate their actions from those of Governor Abbott. They explain that they’re doing their busing out of concern for the migrants, whereas the governor’s actions are publicity-seeking stunts. The would-be asylees, they insist, have been declared legally present by the federal government and that shipping them to NYC is no different than what they had been doing: i.e., sending them to local shelters. The Big Apple was, they appeared to suggest, just a bit further away.
It is true that the city has in the past bused migrants out of West Texas, to Dallas and out-of-state locations such as Albuquerque and Denver, but the New York City destination–because of its Abbott-related controversy–is embarrassing for the city and has rankled local activists. For example, a representative of the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) said in a statement trying to link the two, “There is no so-called invasion in our region as there is no open border. This is just another political tactic from Gov. Abbott to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis at the border and manipulate federal legal provisions meant to address irregular entry from other nations into our country.”
One major difference in the El Paso busing program from that of Abbott is who is footing the bill. In Abbott’s case, it’s the State of Texas. In El Paso’s, it’s you and I, through FEMA.
For more, see the NY Post.