A third bus of migrants was dropped off in Washington, D.C., around 8 a.m. on Friday as part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s plans for transferring to the federal government some of the influx of illegal immigrants released into Texas’s interior as facilitated by the Biden administration.
Last week, Abbott announced that Texas would be taking volunteer illegal immigrants from Texas to Washington, D.C., by bus and plane. The decision was made in response to the Biden administration’s suspension of Title 42, a Trump-era public-health policy that curbed immigration influxes by allowing U.S. border officials to expel migrants on the basis of Covid-19 risk.
Fox News confirmed the arrival of the third bus, which held about 30 migrants, on Friday. The first bus arrived on April 13 and the second on April 14, carrying migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, and Nicaragua.
Abbott had said that the Texas Department of Emergency Management would be responsible for the operation.
“In the last 24 hours, TDEM has dispatched buses to areas where communities have expressed concerns about the federal government dropping off migrants and has the capability to send as many as is necessary to fulfill the requests from mayors and county judges,” Seth Christensen, chief of media and communications for TDEM, told Fox News last week.
The White House initially dismissed the Texas initiative as a “publicity stunt.” On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged the project was legitimate but suggested that Texas would be helping to settle migrants in the U.S., seemingly speaking tongue in cheek.
“These are all migrants who have been processed by CBP and are free to travel, so it’s nice the state of Texas is helping them get to their final destination as they await the outcome of their immigration proceedings — and they’re all in immigration proceedings,” Psaki said when asked during a press briefing about the first bus arriving on Wednesday.
Texas has reportedly rounded up 900 buses for the operation, the state’s Division of Emergency Management chief Nim Kidd said last week, according to CNN.
The governor’s order so far seems to have had a deterrent effect on the federal government’s migrant-relocation program.
“From the [Rio Grande Valley] to Terrell County, a large majority of the communities that originally reached out for support through this operation have now said that the federal government has stopped dropping migrants in their towns since the governor’s announcement on Wednesday,” Christensen told Fox News last week.