When Gov. Greg Abbott announced his first busload of 30 or so migrants, plucked from the streets of Texas, had reached Washington last year, he faced a wall of criticism.
Some on the right worried he was wasting taxpayer money on illegal immigrants. The White House derided the busing as unhelpful and ineffective. And immigration-rights advocates complained that it was a dirty trick that treated the migrants as political pawns.
A year on, those on the right are celebrating Mr. Abbott’s decision as a watershed moment in the immigration debate. And leaders on the left have paid him the sincerest flattery of following his lead, mounting their own busing campaigns.
Among them is New York City, which was one of the destinations for Mr. Abbott’s buses. The city has since begun paying for bus tickets to get migrants out of town, making them someone else’s problem.
Mr. Abbott, a Republican, had said his goal in busing was to share the pain of what his state was facing with the unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants under President Biden, particularly with so-called “sanctuary” cities that limit their cooperation with immigration authorities and pronounce themselves welcoming to those here illegally.
It turns out that the welcome had limits, and Mr. Abbott’s busing campaign found them.
Soon, leaders in Chicago, New York and Washington — all destinations for Mr. Abbott’s buses — were using words like “crisis” to describe the trickle of newcomers.
“It’s pretty clear it had the desired effect, which was to light a fire under the Democrats to do something about the border,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Now they haven’t done as much as I’d like, but there’s no question Democratic mayors complained to the White House and demanded some changes.”
The first migrants arrived at Union Station in Washington on April 13, a Thursday.
The location was chosen because it was close to the Capitol, so members of Congress could get a close-up look at the situation. Congress happened to be on spring break at the time, but members would get plenty of other chances to see migrants.
As of the last public accounting in mid-February, Mr. Abbott’s office said more than 9,100 migrants had been bused to Washington. Another 5,200 had been sent to New York City, some 1,500 to Chicago and 890 to Philadelphia.
The pace has slowed down this year.
The governor’s office didn’t respond to inquiries for this story, but one reason for the slowdown could be that fewer migrants are arriving in Texas in the first place.
The Biden administration announced a new policy in early January to try to siphon some of the illegal border crossings into more orderly crossings by appointment, and through the first two months, it was working. Illegal immigrants are still showing up but in somewhat smaller numbers.
Analysts said Mr. Abbott’s busing can take at least some of the credit for spurring Mr. Biden’s change.
“Obviously Abbott tapped into something and got a rise out of the administration,” Mr. Krikorian said. “It’s been a rousing success, so long as you didn’t think somehow the Biden administration was going to completely change its take on immigration.”
Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said she had some compassion for the situation Texas faced but warned not to forget about the migrants themselves.
They are chiefly Venezuelans, but also Nicaraguans, Cubans, Haitians and others fleeing authoritarian governments or countries in chaos — exactly the sort of folks who needed an orderly welcome. What they got instead, she said, was disorder, with Texas sending them to other communities without any coordination for housing, job assistance or other accommodations.
“It’s not the mayor or the governor of that receiving place who feels the pain — it’s those individuals, who are already vulnerable,” Ms. Murray said. “If he had coordinated, that would be a different thing. This would be an important moment in the immigration debate. But to see already vulnerable folks then treated as political pawns is obviously no party’s goal.”
Maureen Meyer, vice president for programs at the Washington Office on Latin America, also honed in on Texas’s failure to cooperate with the places it was sending the migrants.
“Increased coordination and additional federal support is needed for local communities receiving migrants and asylum seekers but in the meantime, local governments, organizations and volunteers have stepped up independently to help these migrants resettle and obtain legal services to navigate their immigration cases,” she said.
Officials in Washington and New York didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.
For its part, the White House initially mocked Mr. Abbott for wasting Texas taxpayers’ money, saying he was paying to ship people who wanted to leave Texas anyway.
Eventually, the administration also settled on the coordination critique, complaining that moving the migrants made it tougher for them to do check-ins with the government.
Ken Oliver, senior director of Right on Immigration at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said Mr. Abbott’s campaign brought the realities of the border chaos to places that usually didn’t pay attention.
In Washington, city leaders claimed they didn’t have money to handle the several thousand new arrivals, and pleaded with the feds for more cash.
In Chicago, residents balked over a migrant camp being established in their neighborhood.
In New York, Mayor Eric Adams was stashing migrants in a giant tent in a flood zone until activists shamed him into shutting it down. They said he was violating the city’s right-to-shelter law.
Earlier this year he acknowledged the city was offering bus tickets to get migrants to head north, taking a page out of Mr. Abbott’s playbook. Mr. Adams was hoping they would cross the border into Canada.
“As people see migrants housed in hotels that normal Americans would never get the government to pay their way to stay at, much less transportation around the country — it’s helped fuel a backlash,” Mr. Oliver said.
He said some conservatives had “trepidation” over spending taxpayer money on illegal immigrants. But as they looked into the issue, they figured the price tag for a bus seat was far less than the state’s costs for education, public safety and health care for the new arrivals.
“There were skeptics early on, but then you saw validation of it, and even imitation of it by the governor of Florida taking it to another level,” Mr. Oliver said.
After Mr. Abbott began busing, then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey followed, with people delivered from Arizona to the nation’s capital. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis kicked things into another gear with his flight of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a playground for the country’s liberal elite.
Mr. Krikorian said those governors helped “de-Trumpify” immigration, refocusing the debate squarely on Mr. Biden’s struggles and away from former President Donald Trump, who had a knack for poisoning policy positions for much of the public merely because he held them.
“In all of this bussing thing, Trump is not the story at all,” Mr. Krikorian said.
Busing was just one part of Mr. Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, begun in 2021 to try to fill the gaps left by Mr. Biden’s more lenient approach to illegal immigrants.
He has started building border walls on state land, deployed the Texas National Guard and state troopers to the border to deter illegal crossings, and encouraged local prosecutors to bring charges when the feds won’t.
That includes both smugglers and illegal immigrants, whom prosecutors can charge with trespassing.
There have been some significant struggles.
In 2022, Mr. Abbott announced strict state safety inspections for commercial traffic crossing from Mexico. The goal was to pressure Mexico to do more to stop the flood of people and drugs. After a few days and massive delays at the border crossings, Mr. Abbott declared victory and relaxed the inspections — with no long-term dent in the flow of people or drugs.
Wall construction has also been a slog, with just 1.7 miles constructed in 2022. The state is eying another 14 miles of construction across two contracts this year.
The state legislature is eyeing more steps.
One bill now pending would establish a new immigration force to track down unauthorized migrants and slap them with stiffer state penalties, including a $10,000 fine.
“The governor has always said that there’s more to be done. This isn’t the last movie. Operation Lone Star continues to add new initiatives, and that’s happening as we speak in the Texas legislature,” Mr. Oliver said.
