Texas ‘tricking migrants into bus trips to Washington’

MIGRANTS are being “tricked” into boarding buses from border states to the US capital, the mayor of Washington DC has said, with homeless shelters filling up with thousands of new arrivals.

Muriel Bowser hit out at the leaders of Texas and Arizona, saying they had sent 4,000 people to her city since April, at least some of whom thought they were going somewhere else. The White House has labelled the move by Southern states as a “publicity stunt”, and aid agencies in the capital say they are becoming overwhelmed by the volume of migrants arriving daily.

Ms Bowser told CBS: “This is a very significant issue. We have called on the federal government to work across state lines to prevent people from really being tricked into getting on buses.

“We think they’re largely asylum seekers who are going to final destinations that are not Washington DC.

“I worked with the White House to make sure that Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] provided a grant to a local organisation that is providing services to folks. But I fear that they’re being tricked into nationwide bus trips when their final destinations are places all over the United States of America.”

Ana Karina Arce Polano, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, said that an official in Texas told her family they would be sent to Colorado after they got to Washington, but that never happened.

“We arrived here [to] give them a better life and it turns out that we do not even have a place to sleep and no way to get where we want to go,” she said.

Barbara Diaz, a mother of three, also from Venezuela, said she was told they would head on to Chicago. “But it was all a lie,” she added.