Eagle Pass, Texas.- The fall of 2021 was a shock to the state of Texas. More than 9,000 migrants crossed the border one day in September and arrived in the city of Del Rio, where they crowded into a tent camp under a bridge. Thousands more arrived that same week from countries around the world, testing the city’s capacity to accommodate them.
The following spring, Texas opened a new border. On April 13, a bus chartered by the state’s Division of Emergency Management arrived at Union Station in Washington, D.C., carrying 24 migrants who had been offered free transportation from Del Rio. More buses arrived in the capital in the following days.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser suggested that Texas Governor Greg Abbott had “tricked” many of the migrants into riding the buses. The White House called it a “political stunt.”
In the two years since Mr. Abbott dispatched the first buses from Texas, the bus program has become an important part of the country’s migrant transportation infrastructure.
A New York Times analysis of state records, immigration data collected by Syracuse University and records from destination cities, as well as interviews with dozens of immigrants, city officials and leaders of immigration organizations, show that the Texas program continues to expand its reach — new target cities include Boston, Detroit and Albuquerque — and is helping to reshape migration across the United States.
For every five immigrants who had immigration court hearings scheduled in New York, Chicago or Denver over the past two years — a clue to where they planned to live — one immigrant traveled to those cities on a state-funded bus from Texas.
While Mr. Abbott did not create the migration crisis that peaked late last year, the analysis showed that he amplified and concentrated it. He took what might otherwise have been the slow diffusion of migrants from the border to cities and towns across the United States and directed it to a few places.
“I brought the border to them,” Abbott told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention, where cracking down on immigration, a plank of former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign, has been a frequent theme. “Those buses will keep rolling until we finally secure our border.”
In doing so, he appears to have achieved his stated goal: changing the immigration debate in the United States, forcing Democrats to demand greater border security and President Biden to backtrack on many of his promises of a more welcoming immigration policy.
“If one of his goals was to draw attention to what’s happening at the border in a way that many cities in the interior don’t typically feel, then yes, he’s succeeded,” said Camille Joseph Varlack, chief of staff to New York Mayor Eric Adams.
New York has so far spent $4.3 billion to deal with the recent surge of migrants arriving — not all of them on buses from Texas, of course — and that figure was expected to rise to $10 billion by June 2025.
By comparison, the program has cost Texas more than $230 million. In total, through mid-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 has also flown migrants in.
Most were from just one country: Venezuela. Without free transportation, many Venezuelans would have joined large communities of compatriots in places like Florida and Texas.
The numbers for bus transportation in New York are staggering. Since the start of the Texas program through March, some 26,000 Venezuelan immigrants had initial hearings scheduled in New York-area immigration courts. During that same period, nearly 24,000 Venezuelans traveled to New York on a Texas bus.
“Two years ago, the top destinations were Houston and Dallas,” said Valeria Wheeler, executive director of a respite center in the Texas border town 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 migrant arrivals became overwhelmed. Some of the migrants bused from Texas to those cities later moved elsewhere.
New York has paid for more than 35,000 migrants to leave, with Illinois, Florida and, yes, Texas being the top destinations. Denver has bought tickets for 22,000 migrants to go to places like California, Utah and Florida. About 1,400 of them have also returned to Texas. The state of Illinois helped finance more than 7,000 trips from Chicago.
The rapid arrival of so many migrants, especially asylum seekers who cannot obtain work permits for six months, proved to be too much for one city to handle alone.
“We’re willing to provide that assistance,” said Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. “We can’t provide it to everyone.”
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