The migrants ARE legal…..
They are offered free rides OUT of Texas…..
The destinations ARE Democratic cities and states….
His exports have caused problems and expendures for those places where the exports end up at….
His efforts have cost Texas almost $150 Million.…
New York has spent more than $5.1 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, the 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….
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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’s residence in Washington.
Migrant advocates, some of whom had worked with Texas to fill the buses, saw the state’s approach as provocative….
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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…..
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Other cities have experienced similar strains. In New York, arriving migrants tripled the population of city shelters, to around 120,000 people. As of June, more than 45,000 of the migrants arriving in New York had been bused there by Texas, according to Texas data.
“I have learned a lot over the past two years about what other people in other parts of the country have been experiencing,” said Anne Williams-Isom, New York’s deputy mayor for health and human services.
At the same time, Ms. Williams-Isom said, the buses have been an “inhumane strategy” that was implemented “for the sole purpose of creating chaos.”
“I think it has changed the city,” said Denver’s mayor, Mr. 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.
Mr. Johnston said he has tried to speak with Mr. Abbott about the buses. But the governor is not taking his calls…..