The buses rolling in a steady daily succession out of Del Rio — one charter a day, seven days a week, and before that weeks of filling Greyhound buses — represent a microcosm of a much broader aspect of the unfolding mass-migration crisis at the southern border that has attracted limited media coverage and occurs largely outside public view. Tens of thousands of immigrants caught illegally crossing the border and then released under the new leniency policy of President Joe Biden are now dispersing to four corners of the United States on buses, with some of the more moneyed ones taking passenger jets.
As best as the Center for Immigration Studies can determine from interviews and scattered media reporting, the buses are leaving regularly from Del Rio, the Texas Rio Grande Valley communities, and Laredo, but the busing also appears to be going on in Arizona, as well as in California.
Where are the buses going? T
hey often drop their Haitian, Venezuelan, and Cuban passengers in Florida and New Jersey. Those from Nicaragua and other Central American nations have been delivered to Tennessee, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and to large cities in Texas such as Dallas and Houston.
Origin and Scope
The population importation by Greyhound and charter buses began in earnest here in Del Rio and from all major crossing points along the southern border shortly after President Biden took office. That is no coincidence, given that the new president’s first moves were to undo his predecessor Donald Trump’s Mexico Covid-protection push-back-to-Mexico policies for minors and family units and to end a deterring deportation machine that had been flying thousands home to Central America.
Haitian families on a chartered minibus in Del Rio Texas taking them to a local hotel to await a charter bus the next day
Haitian families on a chartered minibus in Del Rio, Texas, taking them to a local hotel to await a charter bus the next day. Photo by Todd Bensman.
In their place came a policy that, for the sake of descriptive simplicity, might be termed “catch-and-bus”. It appears for now to mainly be limited to families, though not always exclusively.
Catch-and-bus developed when a flood of migrants began crashing over the border in Texas and Arizona in the expectation that the new Biden administration would follow through on campaign promises to let almost all illegal entrants into the country, end most deportations, and provide a path to full citizenship.
Immediately overwhelmed and unwilling to return children with their parents, Biden’s DHS began handing out legal permission slips to pursue more permanent legal status later and put them on outward-bound buses. This practice, in turn, only propelled the crisis because, naturally, its satisfied beneficiaries passed on word of the new catch-and-bus practice on social media networks and calls home. A kind of gold rush began over the frontier that has only gathered volume and intensity by the day.
“Jump to the switch of administrations and we saw an immediate surge of 340,” recalled Tiffany Burrow, operations director of the Val Verde County Border Humanitarian Coalition of one particularly busy day, compared to the norm of about 25 a week. “It’s been a steady climb to where we are 100 or 150 a day now. They’re all going into the U.S.”
https://cis.org/Bensman/CatchandBus-...Across-America
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