Bus by bus, Texas’ Governor changed migration across the US

Eagle Pass: The autumn of 2021 delivered a shock to the state of Texas. More than 9,000 migrants crossed the border on a September day into the town of Del Rio and huddled in a tent camp under a bridge. Thousands more came later that week from countries all over the world, challenging the town’s ability to handle them.

The following spring, Texas opened a new frontier of its own. On April 13, a bus pulled into Union Station in Washington DC, carrying 24 migrants who had been offered a free ride from Del Rio, Texas, chartered by the state’s Division of Emergency Management. More buses arrived in the capital over the next several days.

Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, suggested that many of the migrants had been “tricked” into riding the buses by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott. The White House called it a “political stunt.”

In the two years since Abbott dispatched the first buses from Texas, the busing program has turned into a significant part of the country’s transportation infrastructure for migrants.

A New York Times analysis of state records, immigration data collected by Syracuse University and records from the destination cities, as well as interviews with dozens of migrants, city officials and immigration organization leaders, show that the Texas program is continuing to expand its reach — new target cities include Boston, Detroit and Albuquerque, New Mexico — and helping to reshape migration across the United States.

For every five migrants who had immigration court hearings scheduled in New York, Chicago or Denver over the past two years — a clue to where they planned to live — one migrant traveled to those cities on a state-funded bus from Texas.

While Abbott did not create the migrant crisis that reached a peak at the end of last year, the analysis showed, he amplified and concentrated it. He took what otherwise might have been the slow diffusion of migrants from the border to cities and towns across the United States and directed it at just a few places.

“I took the border to them,” Abbott told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention, where drastically curbing migration, a centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s campaign, has been a frequent theme. “Those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.”

In doing so, he appears to have succeeded in his stated aim: to shift the conversation around immigration in the United States, forcing Democrats to demand better border security and President Joe Biden to reverse many of his pledges for a more welcoming immigration policy.

“If one of his goals was drawing attention to what happens at the border in a way that many interior cities don’t feel on a regular basis, then yes, that was successful,” said Camille Joseph Varlack, the chief of staff to Mayor Eric Adams of New York.

New York has spent $4.3 billion so far to handle the recent surge of arriving migrants — not all of whom arrived on Texas buses, of course — and the number was expected to rise to $10 billion by June 2025.

By comparison, the program has cost Texas more than $230 million. Overall, through the middle of June, the state has transported nearly 120,000 migrants on more than 2,600 buses to six cities, state records show. On at least nine occasions, the state also sent migrants by plane.

Most were from a single country: Venezuela. Absent the free transportation, many Venezuelans might have been expected to join large existing communities of their compatriots in places such as Florida and Texas.

The busing numbers in New York are striking. From the start of the Texas program through March, about 26,000 Venezuelan migrants had their initial immigration court hearings scheduled in the New York City area. During that same period, nearly 24,000 Venezuelans traveled to New York on a Texas bus.

“Two years ago, the top destination was Houston and Dallas,” said Valeria Wheeler, executive director of a respite center in the Texas border city of Eagle Pass, describing how travel plans for newly arrived asylum-seekers have changed.

But the picture is even more complicated than it seems: Secondary migration patterns have developed as cities with large numbers of arriving migrants became overwhelmed. Some of the migrants bused from Texas to those cities subsequently moved somewhere else.

New York has paid more than 35,000 migrants to leave, with Illinois, Florida and, yes, Texas among the top destinations. Denver has bought tickets for 22,000 migrants to go on to places like California, Utah and Florida. About 1,400 of them also went back to Texas. The state of Illinois helped fund more than 7,000 trips out of Chicago.

The rapid arrival of so many migrants, particularly asylum-seekers who cannot get work permits for six months, proved too much for any one city to handle alone.

“We’re willing to provide that support,” Mayor Mike Johnston of Denver said. “We can’t provide it to everyone.”

Sudden Impact

Texas made little effort to reduce the chaos that erupted in cities where its buses arrived.

Officials in destination cities said organizers of the program in Texas often refused to work with them or even to warn them when new buses would be arriving. Buses showed up at odd hours, sometimes far from transportation hubs or the nonprofit groups that could help settle the new migrants. In May 2023, for example, two buses dropped a total of about 80 migrants outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in Washington.

Migrant advocates, some of whom had worked with Texas to fill the buses, saw the state’s approach as provocative.

Tiffany Burrow, who directs operations at a nonprofit in Del Rio, said state officials purposely made it hard for her group to coordinate with destination cities and help ease the migrants’ arrival.

In September, she said, her group elected to stop working with the state bus program.

“They’re not doing this for humanitarian reasons,” she said.

Abbott, who declined to be interviewed, has defended the busing program, saying it was undertaken to alleviate the pressure of so many migrants arriving in Texas border communities.

His aides said the goal was to help border towns by creating a lasting transportation program — and to make the political point that large-scale unauthorized immigration was leaving the country in a mess.

“What is going on in New York is calm and organized compared to the real chaos of what we see on the border,” Abbott said during a 2023 talk in New York.

He added that the program was voluntary — “no one is ever put on a bus against their will” — and accounted for only a fraction of the migrant arrivals in major cities. “The lead importer of migrants,” he said, “is not Texas. It’s Joe Biden.”

Bused and bused again

Some cities that had initially welcomed the buses from Texas, hoping they would bring a new source of labor and economic growth, found themselves later rolling back the welcome mat.

One of them was Denver.

Of all the cities targeted by Texas that took in large numbers of migrants over the past two years, the Times analysis showed, Denver appeared to have the highest portion arriving on Abbott buses.

(On the low end was Los Angeles, where very few new migrants arrived on a Texas-chartered bus.)

At first, Denver offered several weeks of free shelter to newly arrived migrants. But after the number of people in shelters grew to 10 times their average level before the migrant surge, reaching nearly 5,000 in January, officials said, the city began offering only 72 hours of free housing. City officials began advising incoming migrants to continue on to somewhere else.

“There is no shelter in Denver,” the signs now read in Spanish inside the city’s main migrant intake center.

Yet the buses keep coming.

At 11:48 p.m. on a June weeknight, a white bus with Texas plates pulled up to a Denver hotel that has served as a way station for newly arriving migrants.

Jhogelvis Salazar, a migrant from Venezuela, stepped off along with 30 others. He had never heard of Denver before agreeing to take a free bus trip there from El Paso, Texas.

At the intake center the next morning, he was told that Denver was out of money for migrant shelter, that jobs were scarce, and that he and the others would be better off somewhere else.

He stood for several minutes looking at a map of the United States. A nonprofit worker suggested that the Pacific Northwest might be a good destination, and he decided to take a bus to Portland, Oregon. The city of Denver, he was told, would pick up the fare.

Angreylis Bolivar, a 27-year-old asylum-seeker from Maracaibo, Venezuela, who arrived in Denver on a Texas bus last fall, opted to stay in the Colorado capital. But it has been rough going.

She lives in a small apartment east of downtown in a complex that houses more than 100 other recent migrants, most of them from Venezuela. Her husband found work in construction, she said, but it has been hard to pay the $1,300 rent. “Lots of competition,” she said, with so many migrants. She said many newcomers have left.

City officials confirmed as much: About half of the 42,000 migrants who have passed through the city’s intake system have since moved on.

At one point, projected spending on services for migrants reached $180 million for 2024 — about 10 per cent of the budget. City officials warned of cuts to city services. The reduced amount of time offered to shelter migrants has since brought down the projected cost.

“I think it has changed the city,” said Denver’s mayor, Johnston , who said it had forced officials to think about immigration in ways they had not before.

Denver now has a program of classes, training and assistance meant to help asylum-seekers prepare for the time — usually several months after arrival — when they are granted work permits. For those who have no hope of getting a work permit anytime soon, he said, the city extended its offer of paid housing to six months.

He said he hoped Denver’s approach would provide a model to other cities for how to be more welcoming. But he acknowledged that a renewed surge in arrivals would probably overwhelm the new system.

Johnston said he has tried to speak with Abbott about the buses. But the governor is not taking his calls.