Greg Abbott in Texas, sending busloads of migrants to blue cities, helped put the border crisis more fully into view for the nation.
It all seemed like a gimmick at first. A chartered bus from Del Rio, Texas, with 24 migrants on board arrived at Union Station in Washington on April 13, 2022. More buses would soon be headed there and elsewhere.
Those arrivals were the opening salvo in an effort by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, to draw the nation’s attention to its overwhelmed southern border — a move that was immediately denounced for using undocumented migrants as political pawns and dismissed by Democrats in Washington as a crass stunt. The governor’s migrant busing effort ultimately transported at least 119,000 migrants to cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, and appears to have mostly wound down earlier this year.
In hindsight, it may have helped Donald Trump win the White House again.
With the program, Governor Abbott pulled off something Trump himself had wanted to do in his first term but abandoned, in part, over legal concerns. If Trump rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to the Oval Office, Abbott helped whip up the storm.
Allies of Abbott, a third-term governor, say he has no interest in going to Washington, as the president-elect assembles his cabinet. But even Democrats who decried his buses as a cynical ploy say the effort profoundly reshaped the politics of immigration in this country — and some are frustrated their party never mustered a stronger response.
“For the first time in history, the border crisis was not limited to border communities,” said Andrea Flores, a former director of border management on President Biden’s National Security Council. “President Biden provided no counternarrative to an effort by Governor Abbott to use human beings as political pawns.”
‘When we start this, we’ll keep doing it’
Early on in the administration, Flores said, a team of Biden appointees knew they would most likely need to rely on northern cities to resettle the migrants who were flooding the border. They mapped out a plan that would have allowed the Biden administration to do such resettling in collaboration with mayors. But it didn’t go anywhere, she said — and migrants kept arriving.