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From Mother Jones magazine:
Capitol Express
Gov. Greg Abbott bused thousands of migrants from Texas to DC. Here’s what became of them.
ISABELA DIAS
Early one Saturday morning in August, some 60 newly arrived migrants—mostly men, and a few families with children and breastfeeding infants—crowd into an activity room at a Washington, DC, church. Their scant belongings, keepsakes from home and tokens from strangers encountered on the journey north, are preserved in transparent Ziplocs and white trash bags. They got here at dawn, after a 1,700-mile, 30-plus-hour road trip aboard two of the more than 150 migrant buses Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has dispatched to the nation’s capital in an act of audacious political theater.
One woman asks me in Spanish where she might find a shower, saying she really needs to clean up. Another wonders whether she could get some new shoes because her cheap rubber sandals are falling apart. Others seek diapers and ointment for babies or medicine to relieve a headache. (At the rector’s request, Mother Jones is not naming the church or the migrants.)
Sixty-year-old volunteer David Swanson, who works weekdays in the finance department of the Human Rights Campaign, is preparing this morning’s breakfast. The first Texas bus arrived in DC on April 13 with about 30 passengers, and the church began receiving migrants in late May. Since then, Swanson has met weary travelers from around the world, Afghans to Venezuelans. He was up at 5 a.m. cooking the first of 130 eggs and eight rolls of pork sausage to accompany melon slices, mandarin oranges, white bread, coffee, and apple juice. He’s worried it won’t be enough. “Luckily, we had a lot of leftover eggs from last week,” he says.
Also present are volunteers from the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, a grassroots coalition that mobilized to meet the incoming buses at Union Station and coordinates with this and other faith-based organizations to help the migrants get to their destinations. “They work like a machine,” Swanson says.
Most of today’s arrivals hail from Venezuela and are oblivious to their role as political pawns. Abbott, a Republican seeking his third term in office, had described the buses as a “voluntary transportation” plan, but the White House dubbed them a “publicity stunt.” The Texas governor claimed he was responding to the Biden administration’s attempts to rescind a pandemic-era policy President Trump invoked to expel migrants and asylum seekers. (The policy remains in place.) Busing them to DC, Abbott said in a statement, would help the administration “meet the needs of the people they are allowing to cross our border.” After Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, followed Abbott’s lead in May, even some prominent Republicans criticized the practice, deeming it a gimmick and a “cute photo-op.”
By September, Abbott had shuttled some 7,600 migrants to DC, costing Texas taxpayers millions of dollars—a crowdfunding campaign organized by the governor’s office to defray the cost had raised only $303,481 as of August 31—and sending district officials and nonprofits scrambling. The busing campaigns were designed to “embarrass pro-immigration politicians and create the appearance of chaos to justify cruel policies,” Hidetaka Hirota, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of a book on the origins of US immigration policy, wrote in the Washington Post.
Also among the church volunteers is Diana Fula, a Colombian-born case manager at Ayuda, a nonprofit that helps low-income immigrants. Clad in a bright blue T-shirt reading “Melt ICE”—as in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—she addresses migrants as “compa,” short for compañero, or companion. I watch Fula sort through boxes of donated clothes and hand them out to the migrants. After breakfast, she announces it’s time to start the intake process. Half a dozen volunteers collect vital information: people’s countries of origin, dates of birth, special circumstances (LGBTQ, pregnancy, chronic illnesses), final destinations, and points of contact, since volunteers may have to follow up to make sure migrants don’t miss ICE appointments and immigration court dates.
The migrants, Fula says, “are desperate to save their lives” and those of their families. Take Esaviel, a slim-built 39-year-old Venezuelan who traveled to Brazil five years ago to provide for his daughter, now 11, who has Type 1 diabetes. But work was scarce, so the family moved to Colombia, where Esaviel’s daily pay as a construction worker equaled a month’s salary back in Venezuela. He invested his savings in his tools, which he sold before leaving for the United States. “I came here for my daughter,” he says, displaying a piece of paper that details her medical condition. He’s been carrying it for 21 days. “I want her to have a normal life.”
Recently, the buses have been arriving almost daily, sometimes several a day, often early in the morning or late at night. Some larger organizations are providing immediate assistance at Union Station, including SAMU First Response, which received $1 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for that purpose. Community groups and volunteers fill the gaps. In July, they worked around the clock, says Ashley Tjhung, an organizer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, whose member groups have spent well over $300,000 on food, housing, transportation, and medical care for the arrivals. For months, she adds, her coalition’s volunteers have been hosting migrants in their homes.
Tjhung laments the lack of response from the DC government. In July, Mayor Muriel Bowser had asked for 150 National Guard troops to help with this “growing humanitarian crisis,” but the Pentagon denied her request. Only 10 to 15 percent of the migrants intend to stay in the region, nonprofit groups estimate. “In many cases, those people are boarding buses having been lied to about what’s going to be on the other end,” Bowser told the Washington Post. “And then they’re still not where they want to be.” In September, she declared a public emergency and announced a new office of migrant services.
A couple of days before my visit to the church, I went to Union Station to witness the arrival of one of the buses. At about 10 p.m., roughly 17 migrants entered the station’s main hall. Mostly men in their late teens or early twenties, they carried brown envelopes and huddled together as they waited to give SAMU volunteers their information. “They’re being thrown back and forth,” said Diego Anjos, a pastor with the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, who had come to see how he might help.
Jesús, a 21-year-old from Venezuela, told me he’d been on the road nearly six weeks. Although he had finished his third year of law school, he saw no future in his crisis-ridden homeland. “There, if you have money, you eat; if not, you don’t,” he said. In his backpack, Jesús carried sneakers and socks, foreign coins, and a letter he’d placed inside double plastic bags that was written by his eight-year-old brother. Now it was reduced to shreds, perhaps a casualty of the river crossing. His brother’s drawing of a heart and an arrow was still visible, though.
“People have seen some unimaginable, heartbreaking things,” said the rector of the church I visited. Congregants had hung up a big map so people could talk about their plans and destinations. The church even started offering Spanish worship services, and migrants have asked the rector to pray for family members or acquaintances who died on the journey north.
On one August afternoon, I find myself sitting with Daniele, a 26-year-old from Venezuela, at a Gregorys Coffee shop downtown. “The heat doesn’t bother me,” she says in Spanish, her eyebrows and manicure impeccable and her dark curly hair tied up with a scarf. “I’m used to it.” Daniele once dreamed of being a naval pilot in Venezuela, but as the political crisis there worsened, she abandoned her aspirations and moved to Ecuador. “It’s very sad to see so many of your dreams going down the drain for circumstances that are outside of your control,” she says. “I planned all my life and none of it came to fruition.”
But Ecuador’s xenophobia was too much, she says—Venezuelans were overcharged for visas, and rental listings explicitly stated that her kind wasn’t welcome. So, in late May, Daniele departed for the United States with 17 others. Along the way, she has slept in the street and been extorted, kidnapped, and detained. After walking three days from one Mexican town to the next, she arrived at Piedras Negras on the border. She crossed the Rio Grande, with water up to her neck, and upon reaching Texas cried and felt safe for the first time in a while. “From the moment I stepped on US soil,” she says, “it was as if a weight was lifted.” After a stop at a border facility for processing, she was released and spent one night at a shelter where staff told her she could board a bus to Washington.
Daniele never imagined she might end up in the nation’s capital. She seems in awe of its public spaces and multicultural vibe, and has decided to stay. She arrived on July 5 with about 70 other migrants and was connected with a church, where she met a woman who took her in. “She’s like a second mother,” Daniele says. Now she’s volunteering at the church, helping others who come. She can’t yet work legally, and it could be months before her asylum application goes through. But for now, she has found peace. “I want to stay here,” she tells me. “I’m happy where I am.”
(Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty: Migrants arrive in the nation’s capital)
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