summarizing
Since June, nearly 1,000 migrants have been bussed from Texas to Los Angeles as a political stunt. A patchwork system has emerged to provide care, services and a humane entry into US life once they arrive in California.
The first clue usually comes from a worker in Brownsville, Texas.
This person informs Los Angeles officials that Texas authorities have just completed the latest roundup of migrants from shelters and meeting places. The state loaded a bus full of men, women and children and headed it to Los Angeles.
As far as Texas is concerned, that’s all state officials have to do: Load the bus, send them out. But in Brownsville, the locals take it upon themselves to provide at least some of the help that Texas is holding back, so they jump on the bus before it departs and create a quick passenger manifest. They get names, phone numbers and other contact information for friends or loved ones they may have in California.
Then the bus leaves. Workers in Brownsville call their counterparts in Los Angeles and pass on the manifesto. The clock starts ticking.
“We have 24 hours to start calling people,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Immigrant Human Rights Coalition, known as CHIRLA. “Everyone must fight.”
Their goal in those 24 hours – the time it takes for the bus to reach Los Angeles – is to contact anyone who can help care for the incoming immigrants, shelter them, feed them, help them to find work and introduce them to life in this country. .
Calls are also being made to Los Angeles representatives and county agencies who can meet the buses and offer services the migrants may need.
Following the law
The buses began arriving in California in June. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his administration have sent at least 28 buses to Los Angeles. A total of 955 immigrants – from pregnant women and women with newborns to unaccompanied minors and the elderly – have arrived in Southern California thanks to Abbott’s directive.
Nothing about the Texas approach suggests that officials there are trying to manage this issue responsibly. The state agents who recruit migrants to the buses do not collect information or try to place them in homes or jobs. They don’t call ahead to let Los Angeles officials prepare.
Abbott’s work is not an immigration strategy. It is, as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass noted, a “political strategy to make Democratic cities look helpless.”
As Bass’s remark suggests, these immigrants are being used and not because they have done anything wrong. Instead, they are legally in the United States. They have not sneaked into the country or crossed the Rio Grande. At great risk to themselves, they have uprooted lives and families to escape violence in their homelands and, after a long and often dangerous journey, have presented themselves legally at US border authorities, following the letter of that nation’s asylum process.
They have just as much right to live in the United States – and enjoy the protection of its laws – as any other person in this country, whether born here or elsewhere.
Feeling welcome
When a bus enters Los Angeles, it usually heads to Union Station, the city’s main train and bus depot, although drivers are sometimes instructed to drop immigrants a few blocks away, just to add to the confusion and confusion. their difficulties. And the same Texas officials who refuse to warn their counterparts in Los Angeles that a bus is on the way sometimes try to alert Fox News, Salas said, hoping to capture scenes of confusion that will bolster the political strategy behind this effort.
At Union Station, immigrants disembark and are given water and a snack. They receive no food or water during the 24-hour trek from Brownsville, although some bring their own. Metro buses then take them from Union Station to a pop-up welcome center often located in a church or community gathering space.
There, they see doctors who screen them for COVID and other possible conditions and offer treatment they may need. Lawyers review any documents they may have, such as dates for asylum hearings. School representatives are talking to parents about registering their children.
“The idea,” Salas said, “is to get people settled quickly.”
For most of the new arrivals, the key is connecting with family or others who are ready to sponsor them. According to Salas, about 80 percent of those who arrive in Los Angeles are quickly reunited with friends or family. In some cases, these connections are elsewhere in the state, resulting in transfers to San Francisco, San Diego, or other communities in California.
These areas become the center of their new life.
Immigrants without family or contacts in the country typically need emergency shelter, which the city provides, even though Los Angeles already faces a homelessness crisis that is in the center of Bass’s agenda.
With homelessness frighteningly affecting so many aspects of life in Los Angeles – not to mention last week’s fire that destroyed a cornerstone of the region’s transportation network – the last thing the city needs is 1,000 more people with critical needs. But advocates here reject the Texas approach, flatly refusing to treat these people as anything less than human.
Instead, they are seen as people driven from their homes and desperate for a chance to live and work in peace—to take advantage of America’s promise as the Germans and the Irish and the Italians did in the migration periods, just as the Syrians and the Vietnamese did. and countless others did in theirs.
Salas herself came to this country at the age of 4, in the company of teenage relatives. She overcame the uncertainties and dangers of reaching the United States and sees in these new immigrants a version of herself.
Today Salas hopes that CHIRLA and others on that end present immigrants with a sense of welcome instead of subjecting them to the “harm and disdain” that greeted their arrival in Texas.
“They’re looking for a better life,” Salas said of those arriving, month after month, bus after bus. “Attempting to do so is not a crime.”