Not everything is a political gesture.
When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas sent busloads of migrants to New York City and Washington, D.C., it was widely scorned as a political stunt, a simple Republican rebuke of Democratic hypocrisy. |
But Megan K. Stack noticed that without grandstanding and little attention, "the Democratic-leaning, immigrant-rich, majority-Latino city of El Paso" had been sending buses full of migrants to New York, Chicago and Miami "in waves that have dwarfed the trickle of buses dispatched by the governor." |
The city had tried to take care of the thousands of Venezuelan migrants who had been streaming over the Rio Grande in a desperate bid for asylum while a quirk of international relations let them enter the United States. |
"You can disagree politically and say they don't have the right to be here," Peter Svarzbein, an El Paso City Council member, told Stack. "But we see them here, and we feel an obligation to do something." |
But the city was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. Soon after welcoming them, El Paso officials and aid groups helped them move on. |
Stack worked along the border early in her career as a reporter, first at The El Paso Times and later as the lone correspondent in the now-defunct Rio Grande Valley bureau of The Associated Press. She came away with a deep affection for El Paso and its people. Reading about the historic influx of asylum seekers and the resulting busing program, she wanted to see for herself what the city was going through and how the border had — and had not — changed. |
In a guest essay this week, Stack describes how she met a family of Venezuelans as they climbed the banks of the river, followed them to a Border Patrol control center and saw how they and their fellow asylum seekers were shuffled from detention to care centers and onto buses north. She found a city that was doing its best, but that wasn't enough. |
"If people don't have places to go, what are we supposed to do?" asked Kari Lenander, executive director of Border Servant Corps. "I think everyone is circling that question." The buses, she said, aren't so political as much as "what must be done." |
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