Buses from Texas have stopped coming for now, but migrants continue to arrive in New York City, attracted by bright lights and sanctuary city laws.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has not sent migrant buses to New York for months because strict measures to stop illegal border crossings have nearly dried up the flow of migrants into the state, a source familiar with the bus program told The Post.
No buses of migrants have left Texas since at least mid-June, and the last ones weren’t even heading to New York, but rather to Chicago and Los Angeles, the sources said.
Through a program that Governor Abbott launched in April, more than 119,000 migrants have been transported by bus to sanctuary cities since 2022.
At the height of the busing effort, New York City was admitting about 3,500 migrants a week. Today, about 800 migrants a week arrive, city officials said.
“We found our way here.”
The latest arrivals are coming on their own: Some migrants who recently arrived in New York City told The Post they had crossed into San Diego.
“Obviously, we got here on our own, without any help,” said Carol Mujica, 43, a Venezuelan migrant who arrived in the city two months ago.
She and her two sons had been trying to get directions to find another shelter in the city after their stay at Roosevelt expired.
“I can’t raise two growing boys in a declining country,” she said. “I want to give them a better life.”
She said she chose New York because she heard it was a sanctuary state, offering protection from deportation.
According to New York City officials, there are currently more than 64,300 migrants being held in the city’s shelter system, and more than 210,000 migrants have come through the city’s system since spring 2022.
How the migrant bus made the border a national issue
Abbott’s busing program began unannounced in April 2022, when the first convoy of migrants arrived from the border block of the U.S. Capitol.
Then, one Friday in August, 50 immigrants stepped off a bus at New York’s Port Authority Terminal, marking the beginning of a dramatic change in the city.
The program dramatically shifted the debate about illegal immigration and the immigration crisis, transforming the issue from a border state problem to a national one as Democratic leaders in big cities like New York, Chicago and Denver pressure the Biden administration to act to secure the border.
The goal of Abbott’s effort is to “provide much-needed relief to border communities that are overwhelmed and in disarray as the Biden administration leaves thousands of migrants behind in Texas border towns,” spokesman Andrew Maharelis told the Post.
“Fewer illegal border crossings into Texas will result in fewer buses. Until the Biden-Harris Administration is up and running on border security, Texas will continue to bus migrants to sanctuary cities so local partners can respond to the border crisis,” Maharelis said.
Prime Minister Abbott’s tough border policy proves effective
Advocacy groups in Texas say they aren’t seeing enough people to fill buses and blame the governor’s actions at the border.
Joe Baron, vice president of the Holding Institute, a migrant advocacy group in Laredo, told The Washington Post that the group hasn’t ordered buses since April, when it had a group of migrants hoping to get to New York City.
For Baron and other migrant advocacy groups to request buses, they need at least 45 migrants heading to one destination, but right now, he said, only 15 are showing up a day.
Abbott’s border security mission, called “Operation Lone Star,” began in March 2021 and quickly expanded into a multi-billion-dollar state-led effort with Abbott stepping in where the federal government has not.
Governor Abbott has deployed state police and the National Guard and added physical barriers, such as barbed wire, to prevent illegal border crossings and begin cracking down on smuggling.
In March, Governor Abbott went a step further, after the El Paso immigration riots captured on video by The Washington Post and gone viral, in which hundreds of illegal crossers stormed gates along the border wall, overpowering troops on the ground and some being assaulted.
The state government has since equipped its soldiers with more non-lethal weapons, such as pepper balls, and installed more barbed wire along the border.
Maharelis said the measures have reduced illegal immigration into the state by 85 percent.
Since then, response at the South Texas border crossing has “slowed dramatically,” Barron said.
“All of these things are a deterrent. Mr Abbott is tightening the screws and making things more difficult,” he said.
Tiffany Barrow, president of the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, told The Washington Post that the organization stopped using the buses in September 2023 after determining that they were “no longer useful from a humanitarian perspective.”
In the border area where Barrow runs his organization in Del Rio, Texas, operations began to slow in January 2023 as the number of migrants needing assistance dropped to “nowhere near the numbers we needed to run buses.”
And things slowed further last month when President Joe Biden introduced new measures to remove more migrants by excluding those who crossed the border illegally from asylum eligibility.Summer is a time when migration typically declines because of extreme heat.
In June, Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the southern border fell to their lowest level under the Biden administration, with about 83,000 illegal crossings recorded. According to federal government data.
How the immigration crisis has affected New York City
Despite the slowdown, New York City is now only “years behind” border towns like Eagle Pass, Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents much of the South Texas border, told The Post.
“Eagle Pass has been destroyed. Our hospital has been destroyed because of the tremendous care of so many different people. That’s one example. Our school has been destroyed,” Gonzalez said.
“The danger that I’ve seen personally is that anything that involves this border crisis is going to destroy communities.”
At the height of the busing effort, New York City scrambled to house immigrants, and more than two years later, 15 percent of the city’s hotel rooms are being converted into migrant shelters.
New York’s poorest zip codes have borne the brunt of the crisis, forcing the creation of more migrant shelters in their neighborhoods.
The arrival of migrants has sparked a new crime wave in New York, where a violent Venezuelan gang, the Tren de Aragua, is active and recruiting from the new arrivals.
The gang is responsible for attacks on police officers, robberies on mopeds and smuggling guns into migrant shelters.
Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, a 19-year-old immigrant charged with shooting and killing two NYPD officers on June 3, reportedly told police he was recruited by a “coordinator” of a Venezuelan gang in the Big Apple to join a ring of moped “snatching” thefts.
Governor Abbott has said the bus transportation effort is not officially over, so New Yorkers should still be able to expect buses to come.
“These buses will keep on rolling until we finally secure our border,” he said in a recent speech at the Republican National Convention.
