Reuters World News - Following the migrants being bused from Texas to Democrat-led cities

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Texas' Republican Governor Greg Abbott has said he wants to “bring the border” to Democratic-led cities by offering migrants free bus rides north. The sudden influx of 100,000 asylum seekers has strained social services in these cities, which has put more pressure on President Joe Biden. But what is it like for those who take the trip? Our reporter Kristina Cooke spoke to over a dozen migrants about their journey and kept in touch with them as they tried to make a home in the U.S.. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Brownsville, Texas, people are boarding a bus to Chicago. Everyone on board has been given a free ticket to ride, paid for by the state of Texas. These are migrants, most of whom on this day were Venezuelan, who say they're fleeing threats or looking for work in a way to provide for their family. But they've also become central players in a highly charged debate over immigration

in the US. On today's special episode of Reuters World News, we'll focus on how the Republican tactic of busing migrants to democratic-led cities is affecting those on the bus. Reuters' journalists spoke with more than a dozen migrants travelling from Brownsville to Chicago, New York City and Denver, and have stayed in touch with seven of them over the months to see how they're faring. I'm Kim Vinal. Texas says it's spent more than 100 million.

million dollars since 2022 to bus tens of thousands of migrants who recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to democratic cities. The arrivals have exacerbated homelessness and taxed social services in the cities they're sent to. This has raised the pressure on President Joe Biden to address the increase in crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border ahead of his re-election bid. The national government must fix this problem. That's New York Mayor Eric Adams. This is a national problem that has only been exacerbated by Governor Abbott's cruel, inhumane politics, and that requires additional national solutions. As a political battle heats up, our journalists, Christina Cook among them, wanted to hear from those at the very center.

We spent four days in Brownsville in late October outside the bus station, where the migrants who had recently crossed the border were waiting for notification of when a bus to their chosen destination would leave. The buses leave when there are enough people to fill them, so there's no schedule. In Brownsville, they're greeted by volunteers such as Andrea Rudnick,

who leads Team Brownsville, which is a nonprofit that works out of a building next to the bus station. I feel an obligation to serve people who just need a hand, Just need a hand up, not a handout. And you will hear the voices of people here say, I came to work hard.

I came to be a strong person for my family and be able to do the best for them. Oh, Chicago. Team Brownsville gives the migrants donated clothes and food, and they also make sandwiches for people to eat on the buses. Most of the people we spoke with, They'd exhausted their savings, getting to the border, and so they welcomed the free buzzing

and didn't know much, if anything, about the political background of why the buses were free or why they existed. While the migrants wait for notification from the city about when a bus might leave, people sleep in shelters or hotels or outside the bus station, most don't want to stray far

because they're worried about missing a bus. Many of the migrants are from Venezuela, and they've left for a variety of reasons, political oppression, violence, poverty. We met Jose Manuel, who had just been released from detention after an asylum officer found he had a credible fear of persecution. He had planned to head to South Carolina where he had a friend and possible work, but he changed his plan and headed to Chicago because there was no free bus to South Carolina.

and as the days passed, people were getting quite antsy. They were checking in with each other. Has anyone heard, when is the next bus to Chicago? Somebody had heard that a bus to Denver would take more than a week to fill up. We talked to more than a dozen people as they were waiting and got to know them so that then later when we reconnected with them in Chicago, we had already built a level of trust and were able to keep in contact with them over time. In Brownsville, we met a Venezuelan-Columbian couple, Marie and Fernando.

They'd fled gang threats in Colombia and had crossed the border with an app appointment. They were hoping to go to Chicago and quickly find work. But as the days passed and it wasn't clear when a bus would leave, Marie got an offer of some temporary housekeeping work in Florida, along with a bus ticket to get there. The couple made the hard decision to temporarily separate. Fernando would take the bus to Chicago, and Marie would head to Florida.

So on October 24th in the early morning, we got some texts from some of the migrants that we'd gotten to know at the bus station, telling us that they'd gotten a notification to come to the bus station at 3 o'clock in the morning. So we headed there and waited with them as the bus boarded. And then we followed the bus to Chicago. It was a 26-hour drive, and we took turns driving three hours each to get there.

And the idea was that we would be there when the bus arrived and be able to immediately reconnect with them as they got off in Chicago. We didn't know where the bus would stop, which was the reason that we followed. the bus directly for 26 hours. And what happened when they arrived? So one of the families that we'd gotten to know, a Colombian mother, Alejanna Perez and her two young kids were loaded onto a yellow school bus that was waiting near the drop-off point.

They thought that they were going to be taken to a shelter. They'd heard that as a family, they'd be given priority for shelter spots. But instead they were taken to a police station in the Shakespeare district of Chicago and were told when they got there that there was no space for them and told to try their luck at the airport. So they took public transport to the airport and were then told that they couldn't sleep there either and were taken back to that original police station. In the end, around midnight, which was about 40 hours after they left Brownsville,

they finally went to sleep and a tent outside of that police station and they would end up staying outside that police station for two weeks even as it started getting cold and snow started falling. We kept in touch with Alejanda for several months. After two weeks, she got a family shelter spot. She described the shelter as being one floor with 100 families sleeping side by side on cots. She said it was very noisy and arguments would often break out.

I spoke with her just a week before Christmas, and her 9-year-old daughter had chickenpox and her 5-year-old son had been vomiting for two days, and she was lining up for medical care at the shelter. And she said she didn't have any money for medicine. The people that we spoke to, their main focus was on trying to find work. They wanted to get their work permits as quickly as possible,

They wanted to be able to sustain themselves. They wanted to start their lives. And many of them were shocked when they got to Chicago and found themselves having to sleep outside in the cold, outside of police stations. Fernando ended up sleeping in a makeshift encampment outside another police station in central Chicago. But by early January, he had taken a commercial bus to Florida to reunite with Marie. neither he, not Alejandra or anyone else that we kept in touch with,

had gotten their work permits yet by early January. Thanks again to Christina and our immigration reporters for their work and bringing this story to light. Reuters World News is produced by myself, Jonah Green, Tara Oaks, David Spencer, and Christopher Waljester. Our senior producer is Carmel Crimmons. Our executive producer is Lila de Kretzer. Engineering and Sound Design by Josh Summer. We'll be back tomorrow with a primer on what to expect from the New Hampshire primary.

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