Greg Abbott’s D.C. Migrant Bus Is a Dehumanizing Political Stunt

After years of Republican doomsaying, a bus of undocumented immigrants finally arrived in Washington, D.C. But these migrants didn’t end up in the nation’s capital by choice—they were shipped to the Beltway by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in a craven publicity stunt that dehumanizes migrants and further humiliates the state of Texas.

Abbott’s bus stunt comes after the governor directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to scoop up any migrants released from federal custody and ship them to other states. And so they readied the mission, securing 900 buses capable of transporting up to 40 migrants at a time until Texas has made its political dysfunction someone else’s problem. Abbott reportedly said a second bus is en route to D.C. right now. And if buses don’t get the job done fast enough, Abbott has plans to charter private flights to Washington on the taxpayer dime.

While the governor’s gambit may delight the talking heads at Fox News—one of Abbott’s migrant buses dropped three dozen immigrants off just a few feet away from the network’s Washington headquarters—it also marks a clear acceleration in Texas’ rightward shift toward dehumanizing women, minorities, and migrant communities.

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Abbott launched his publicity stunt/human rights violation after the Biden administration lifted a pandemic-related immigration policy that allowed local authorities to turn away migrants on public health grounds. Infuriated that Texas would actually be required to treat asylum-seeking migrants as actual people, Abbott and his far-right cronies opted instead to make these migrants’ shattered lives even more painful with an unexpected bus trip across the country.

“If I were to go to Washington, D.C., and take you and put you on a bus and take you down to the Rio Grande Valley, that would be kidnapping,” Abbott told Fox News last week in a rare moment of sanity. But that acknowledgement hasn’t stopped Abbott from upending the lives of migrants already fleeing violence and persecution, all for a few minutes of television time.

And despite Abbott’s repeated claims his migrant caravans are completely “voluntary,” the stories of migrants dropped off in Washington on Wednesday morning paint a darker picture. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, noted in a Twitter thread that quite a few of Abbott’s caravan members are already buying bus and plane tickets to their actual destinations, a “sign that Abbott’s ‘voluntary’ bus trips were probably not.”

For a governor who never misses an opportunity to crow about strengthening “law and order” in the Lone Star State, Abbott’s publicity stunt is not only a shockingly callous act, it’s also a potential crime, as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki argued last week.

“I think it’s pretty clear that this is a publicity stunt,” Psaki told reporters during a White House press briefing. “I know that the governor of Texas, or any state, does not have the legal authority to compel anyone to get on a bus.” The question remains, though: If Abbott lacks the authority, and it is increasingly clear many of the D.C. caravan’s passengers had no desire to arrive in Washington, what will the federal government do about it?

The answer? Probably not much. Unlike his strong stances on issues like voting rights and infrastructure improvements, immigration is one area where the Biden administration lacks broad public support. And Biden’s move to revoke those pandemic-era border policies is already unpopular: 56 percent of registered voters oppose it, including over half of independents.

Biden was right to end the discriminatory Trump-era policies that led to COVID outbreaks on the border and dehumanized migrants in need of American protection. But his administration is unlikely to take the fight to Abbott if that means being anchored to an immigration debate during the heat of the midterm election cycle. And so, as usual, migrants will be left on their own.

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At some point, though, polling must stop preventing the President of the United States from fully protecting the human rights and human dignity of migrants on our southern border. Americans aren’t opposed to offering asylum to those in need—most Americans support Biden’s decision to offer asylum to roughly 100,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russian persecution. That American voters don’t feel the same compassion for Hispanic refugees fleeing violence in nations like Guatemala, Venezuela, and El Salvador shows how deep and unconscious right-wing otherization of migrants based on skin color has become.

Unwilling to craft state policies that actually address the surge in asylum-seeking on the southern border and addicted to the easy media coverage of publicity stunts, Abbott and Texas Republicans are unlikely to stop their abuses.

But there are signs that Abbott’s cruelty is too much even for the few Texas GOP officials still interested in actually repairing our broken immigration system. “It’s a gimmick,” Texas GOP Rep. Matt Schaefer tweeted dismissively.

Unfortunately for the migrants whose lives have once again been upended by a cruel and abusive state regime, Texas’ latest “gimmick” only succeeds in perpetuating the pain these migrants fled to the United States to escape.

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