Busing migrants from Texas to sanctuary cities costs millions of dollars. Is it helping?
Texas has put on buses 13,200 migrants taken from the border with Mexico and dropped off at sanctuary cities at the cost of $26 million since April 2022.
When President Joe Biden announced early last year that he was suspending Title 42, many Republican states, including Texas, objected. Gov. Gregg Abbott responded with Operation Lone Star — a state initiative that sent thousands of migrants on buses to Washington, D.C.; New York City and Chicago.
Does sending migrants to sanctuary cities help Texas? It depends on who you ask.
“The busing mission is providing much-needed relief to our overwhelmed border communities,” the state says in a statement. “Operation Lone Star continues to fill the dangerous gaps left by the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border.”
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration faces the challenge of housing and feeding the migrants stepping off the buses “at a time when city resources are strained,” reports the Washington Post.
“More than 170 buses have arrived in the District from the two states so far, including two from Texas this week, in what began as a protest in April 2022 by Republican governors over President Biden’s border policies. The resulting images of families seeking U.S. asylum sleeping on city streets jolted the immigration debate,” the Washington Post writes.
Biden ends Title 42, sends troops to help secure border
A pandemic-era immigration policy the Trump administration championed ended at midnight Thursday leaving uncertainty at the border with Mexico over what is to come next.
Title 42 was used by federal authorities to turn back immigrants wishing to apply for asylum in the United States — carrying out more than 2.6 million expulsions. Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, then President Donald J. Trump used an interpretation of a rarely used clause in the 1944 Public Health Service Act to speed up the return of migrants crossing the U.S. border with Mexico.
The lifting of the pandemic emergency spelled the end of the border policy.
Anticipating the rush of migrants north to Texas, last week President Joe Biden ordered 1,500 troops to the border with Mexico. The U.S. military has long provided support to the Department of Homeland Security on the border and a surge of personnel to the area is not unprecedented. There are already 2,500 National Guard members at the border.
More than 11,000 migrants have crossed the southern border illegally some days this week, according to internal agency data obtained by The New York Times, overwhelming holding facilities run by the Border Patrol.
The surge at the border had troubled leaders at three Texas border cities — Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso — forcing them to declare states of emergency before Title 42 expired.
