A Chicago city official has walked back an earlier claim that the city was bracing for potentially tens of thousands of migrants to be bused in from the Texas border during the Democratic National Convention.
“We at this point do not have any credible intel that there will be a large surge in terms of buses coming from Texas,” Chicago’s deputy mayor for immigration, Beatriz Ponce de Leon, told the Chicago Tribune in a report published Thursday.
Ponce de Leon sounded the alarm in July when she claimed that the city was looking at “20,000 to 25,000 people arriving” ahead of and during the DNC.
The Washington Examiner conducted an analysis this week of state data on Texas’s busing operations. The state has bused migrants to six cities since 2022, including Chicago.
However, buses to Chicago quietly tapered off in May, and no bus has arrived in Chicago from Texas since June 14.
From August 2022 through July 2023, about 4,300 migrants were bussed to Chicago. Arrivals ticked up quickly last fall, and the state reached 17,200 by November.
By New Year’s, more than 28,000 migrants had arrived in Chicago on the Texas buses.
The numbers continued to rise at a slower rate than the previous year in early 2024. By April, arrivals topped 34,000 but flatlined by early June after topping 36,000.
In each of the past seven weeks, the state has not disclosed transporting migrants to Chicago.
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Roughly 46,000 migrants who came over the southern border have sought refuge in Chicago over the past two years, with nearly 37,000 of them arriving on buses that were arranged through the state government in Texas.
The buses offered migrants rides to certain cities that self-identified as “sanctuary” zones for migrants, typically Democratic Party-run jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities.