Global Courant
Another bus of Texas migrants will arrive in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon, courtesy of the governor and taxpayers of the Lone Star State.
The 48 migrants on the bus were recently paroled by the Border Patrol and are making the 2,600-mile journey voluntarily, according to immigrant lawyers who were notified of the move on Friday. It is not clear where they are deposited.
This will be the second bus to arrive from the Texas-Mexico border in just over two weeks after Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced Los Angeles as the latest Democratic-led city to which Texas will carry migrants.
As of April 2022, Texas has transported more than 22,000 migrants to Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Denver. The first bus to LA, carrying 42 migrants from McAllen, arrived on June 14.
At the time, several Los Angeles immigrant organizations had formed a “Welcome Committee.” Members of that coalition were warned on Friday that a second bus was on its way, and emergency workers immediately began preparing to greet the passengers.
Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said her organization coordinated between the Los Angeles welcome committee, city officials and nonprofit partners in Brownsville.
Joseph said the Alliance had worked with partners in Texas to ensure that anyone who boarded the bus, either family, court appointments or both, was waiting for them in Los Angeles. She said she was assured that everyone who made the trip was provided with multiple meal options and plenty of water.
All passengers voluntarily boarded the state-funded buses from Texas, officials said. Abbott has said the buses are a form of protest against Democrats’ immigration policies, but many migrants are eager to accept the free ride to cities where they can reunite with family and loved ones. This opportunity has led immigrant relief agencies along the Texas border to partner with the bus program, even though they don’t endorse Abbott’s political message.
“The Haitian Bridge Alliance strongly condemns Governor Abbott’s policies and (his practice of) using the lives of extremely vulnerable people… for political games,” Joseph said. However, she said she recognizes that the buses are an opportunity for many migrants to reunite with family. For those passengers heading to LA, Joseph said her organization and others will be ready to welcome them.
In June, 36 migrants were sent to Sacramento on charter flights, organized under the direction of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who has also been critical of President Biden’s immigration policies. The migrants from Central and South America were voluntarily bussed from Texas to New Mexico, where they boarded flights to California.
Documents carried by the migrants showed that the flights were arranged by the Florida Division of Emergency Management and that they were part of the state’s program to move migrants, mostly from Texas, to other states. Their transportation was paid for by the state of Florida.
The contractor for the program was Vertol Systems Co., which last year coordinated similar flights that took dozens of Venezuelan asylum seekers from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The case is being investigated by the California Attorney General’s Office.
