The buses from Texas have stopped for now, but the migrants keep coming to New York City — attracted by bright lights and sanctuary city laws.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott hasn’t sent a migrant bus to the Big Apple in months after migrant flows into the Lone Star State all but dried up thanks to his strict measures to deter illegal crossings, a source with knowledge of the busing program told The Post.
No migrant buses have left Texas since at least mid-June, and the last of the buses didn’t even head to New York — they were bound for Chicago and Los Angeles, the source said.
Since 2022, Abbott bused over 119,000 migrants to sanctuary cities through a program he started in April 2022.
At the height of the busing effort, New York City was receiving around 3,500 migrants per week. Now, about 800 migrants per week are still coming, City Hall said.
‘We found our own way here’
The latest arrivals are coming on their own. Several of New York City’s recently arrived migrants told The Post they’d crossed into San Diego.
Carol Mujica, 43, a Venezuelan migrant who arrived to the city two months ago said, “Of course, we found our own way here, no help.”
She and her two boys were trying to get directions to find another shelter in the city after their time limit for staying in the Roosevelt ran out.
“I couldn’t raise two growing boys in a failing country,” she said. “I want to give them a better life.”
She said she chose New York because she heard it was a sanctuary state and she would be protected from deportation.
New York currently has more than 64,300 migrants in the city shelter system, and has seen more than 210,000 migrants come through the city system since the spring of 2022, according to City Hall.
How migrant buses made the border a national issue
Abbott’s busing program began without warning in April 2022 when the first load of migrants arrived from the border blocks from the US Capitol.
Then, on an August Friday, 50 migrants offloaded from a bus at New York’s Port Authority Terminal in what would be the start of a dramatic change for the city.
The program dramatically reshaped the debate on illegal immigration and the migrant crisis — turning it from a border state issue into a national one as the Democratic leaders of New York, Chicago, Denver and other big cities pressured the Biden administration to take action to secure the border.
The goal of Abbott’s effort, his spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris told The Post, was to provide “much-needed relief to our overrun and overwhelmed border communities as the Biden Administration leaves thousands of migrants in Texas border towns.”
“Less illegal crossings into Texas means there are fewer buses. Until the Biden-Harris Administration steps up and does their job to secure the border, Texas will continue busing migrants to sanctuary cities to help our local partners respond to this border crisis,” Mahaleris said.
Abbott’s tough border policies at work
Texas aid groups say they aren’t seeing enough people to fill the buses and attribute that to the governor’s actions on the border.
Joe Barron, assistant director at the migrant aid organization Holding Institute in Laredo, told The Post that his organization hasn’t ordered a bus since April, when they had a group of migrants wanting to go to New York City.
In order to request buses, Barron and other migrant aid groups need to have at least 45 migrants wanting to go to a single destination. He said he’s getting just 15 people a day at this point.
Abbott’s border mission, dubbed Operation Lone Star, began in March 2021 and quickly grew to a multi-billion dollar state-led effort for Abbott to step in where the federal government hadn’t.
Abbott began deploying state troopers and the National Guard, while adding physical barriers like razor wire to deter illegal crossings and crackdown on smuggling.
In March, Abbott went a step further. That was after the El Paso migrant riot, as seen in viral footage taken by The Post, when hundreds of illegal border crossers stormed a gate along the border wall and overpowered the troops on the ground, some of whom were assaulted.
The state then armed soldiers with more less-lethal weapons like pepper balls and put up more border wire.
The measures led to an 85% decrease in illegal crossings into the state, said Mahaleris.
Since then, Barron said things have been “dramatically slow” with crossings in south Texas.
“All of that deters. Abbott has really tightened up the screws, made it harder,” he said.
Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition director Tiffany Burrow told The Post her organization stopped using the buses in September of 2023 when she determined the buses were “no longer helpful from a humanitarian standpoint.”
The border region where Burrow operates her organization in Del Rio, Texas, started to see a slowdown in January of 2023, when the number of migrants needing aid decreased and there weren’t enough “to reach the required number for a bus to run.”
Then, when President Joe Biden introduced new measures last month to remove more migrants by making them ineligible for asylum when they cross the border illegally, things slowed even more. The summertime is also typically marked by a decrease in migration because of the deadly heat.
In June, migrant encounters by border agents at the southern border dipped to the lowest level seen under the Biden administration, with roughly 83,000 illegal crossings recorded, according to federal data.
How the migrant crisis hit New York City
Even with the slowdown, New York City is now just “a couple years behind” border towns like Eagle Pass, Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents the largest portion of the south Texas border, told The Post.
“Eagle Pass has been consumed. Our hospitals have been consumed with a lot of care from these different folks, that’s one example. Our schools have been consumed,” said Gonzales.
“The danger I see, that I have personally seen, is anything that this border crisis touches, it consumes a community.”
At the height of the busing effort, New York City scrambled to house migrants, and over two years later, has turned 15% of its hotel rooms to migrant shelters.
The Big Apple’s poorest zip codes have had to bear the brunt of the crisis, supporting more migrant shelters in their neighborhoods.
The migrant arrivals have also ushered in a new crime wave in New York, where the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has been operating and recruiting from the batches of new arrivals.
The gang has been responsible for attacks on cops, moped snatch and grab robberies and gun smuggling into migrant shelters.
The 19-year-old migrant charged with shooting two NYPD cops on June 3, Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, allegedly told police he was recruited by the Venezuelan gang’s Big Apple “coordinator” to join their squad of “snatch and grab” moped thieves.
New Yorkers should still expect buses to come as Abbott says that the busing effort hasn’t officially ended.
“Those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border,” he said during his recent speech at the Republican National Convention.
