Los Angeles mayor says Texas governor ‘using human beings as pawns’ amid reports migrants were not given food or drink on bus
Texas governor Greg Abbott’s decision to bus migrants to Los Angeles this week has been decried as a “despicable stunt”, as advocates in California reported that the group was not offered food during the 23-hour trip.
On Wednesday, 42 migrants, including 15 youth and three babies, arrived at Union Station in downtown LA, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the communications director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights-Los Angeles (Chirla), who met the group when they arrived. The travelers he spoke to came from Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti, and one came from China, he said, adding some told him they had been on the bus for nearly a day without any food or drink.
Abbott tweeted that it was the “1st bus of migrants” arriving in LA, claiming Texas border towns “remain overrun & overwhelmed because Biden refuses to secure the border”. Recent reports, however, have found that the number of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border is at its lowest levels since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Abbott has faced increasing scrutiny for his bussing program over the last year, which has reportedly sent tens of thousands of migrants to Democratic-run cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington.
Immigrants’ rights groups have said the practice can be exploitative and cruel, noting last year that one bus Abbott sent to Philadelphia had a 10-year-old girl on it who had to be hospitalized from dehydration and a high fever. Last month, the governor sent buses to vice-president Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington.
“It is abhorrent that an American elected official is using human beings as pawns in his cheap political games,” LA mayor Karen Bass said in a statement, adding that after she took office last year, she directed city agencies to plan for possible scenarios in which LA “was on the receiving end of a despicable stunt that Republican governors have grown so fond of”.
