Abbott seeks donations for bus trips
Gov. Greg Abbott appeared on Fox News this week touting a program he’s been pushing for weeks — sending migrants who enter into Texas to Washington, D.C., by charter bus.
But this time, Abbott asked Texans to personally contribute their own money to pay for the trips.
The decision to crowdfund the free bus trips for migrants is a new development — he initially announced that it would be paid for by Texas taxpayers. At the time, Abbott proudly presented the trips as a tough-on-immigration act of defiance against the Biden administration.
But the shift to ask private donors to pay for the charter buses comes as his plan has been increasingly praised as an act of generosity by Democrats, immigration rights groups and even the migrants who rode the buses, while those further to Abbott’s right politically have panned it as a misuse of taxpayer dollars that incentivizes migrants to cross into Texas.
“Congratulations to Governor Abbott,” Texas Rep. Gene Wu said in a tweet. “Word will be passed from community to community that if you can just get to Texas, the Governor there will pay for your transportation anywhere in the USA.”
Abbott announced the charter bus plan April 6 as a way to get President Joe Biden’s attention in response to the president’s announcement that he was lifting Title 42, a pandemicera health order that allowed immigration authorities at the border to deny entry to migrants as a way to contain the coronavirus. Officials have said the repeal of the policy likely will be followed by a sharp increase in illegal border crossings.
“Securing the border would cost Texas nothing if the federal government was doing its job but because Joe Biden is not securing the border, the state of Texas is having to step up and spend Texas taxpayer money doing the federal government’s job,” Abbott said at the time.
He clarified later that the bus trips would be entirely voluntary for migrants after they had been processed by U.S. immigration officials, leading to scoffing from some in Abbott’s party about the seriousness of his plan.
Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple questions about the policy, including why the governor is now asking for private donations, if the plan will be partially or solely funded by private donations and how much the busing program has cost so far. As of Friday, the state-hosted website accepting funds for the transportation lists the current donation tally as $67,700.
Abbott also has not disclosed how much state funding already has been used toward the trips.
In a statement to the Texas Tribune, Abbott’s press secretary Renae Eze said the idea to crowdsource came after Abbott’s office received calls from supporters wanting to contribute.
“After Governor Abbott announced his plan to bus migrants to President Biden’s backyard in Washington, D.C., we received an outpouring of support from across our state and the entire country of people wanting to help and donate to the operation,” she said. “Texas continues stepping up to help our local partners and protect Texans — it’s time for President Biden and Congress to step up and do their job to secure our border.”
Mark Jones, a political
science professor at Rice University, said the governor may be trying to escape blowback.
“I think it’s a quiet way of protecting himself from criticism that he’s using taxpayer dollars to provide free transport for undocumented immigrants,” he said. “Many conservatives
pounced on him as all hat and no cattle, in that he was talking tough, but in the end all his busing was going to do was provide a free trip for undocumented migrants to the East Coast that they otherwise would have had to pay for or that liberal nonprofits would have had to pay for.”
Abbott’s office has said at least 10 buses have arrived in the nation’s capital, but his office has not provided costs for the trips or the total number of migrants who have been transported.
The New York Times also reported this week that Abbott’s buses are now dropping migrants off in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina.
Disclosure: Rice University, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and New York Times have been financial supporters of the Texas Tribune. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.