Feds plan to dump immigrants in cities away from border: officials
The Biden administration is working on plans to bus immigrants from overwhelmed border communities in Texas and dump them in cities and towns hours away, according to several Lone Star State pols.
San Angelo, Texas, about three hours from the US-Mexico border was scouted as a location to bus the immigrants, Republican US Rep. August Pfluger told The Post.
“San Angelo is a welcoming community, but the locality has not volunteered for this mission, nor are they responsible for the burdens of the border crisis,” said Pfluger, who represents the area in Congress. “This situation is a direct result of [the Department of Homeland Security’s] shortsighted policies that encourage more illegal immigration and the agency’s failure to establish operational control of the southern border.”
Pfluger said he was alerted to the situation by San Angelo law enforcement, who were alarmed about their ability to absorb any amount of immigrants. San Angelo has a population of just over 100,000.
In a letter to DHS, Pfluger demanded to know what plans the department had to drop off immigrants in San Angelo or other Texas cities, whether chosen communities would receive any kind of notice that the people were heading their way and if DHS would provide local leaders background checks on the new arrivals.
Pfluger said that so far, he has only been contacted by officials from Customs and Border Protection and told San Angelo was merely being considering as a possible location but that no plans were set at this time.
“You can only assume that they’re looking at other locations or that plans can change in the future,” Pfluger told The Post.
Currently, immigrants who cross the border illegally and are seeking asylum are released after being processed by the Border Patrol and ICE. They are usually dropped off at bus stations in border communities such as Del Rio, Texas, where a Stripes gas station doubles as the bus depot. The immigrants then usually head to cities in the interior of the United States and do not plan on staying in border communities. While they wait to get a bus ticket or airfare to their final destination, they usually remain in small border towns, sometimes without a place to sleep.
“Yes, it will relieve some of the pressure off of the border communities, but then it’s going to create a problem in other communities,” said Robert Beau Nettleton, a county commissioner in Val Verde County, Texas, of the Biden administration’s reported relocation plan. The county has been identified by Texas officials as being one of three hot spots for border crossings.
“We’re not solving problems. We’re just moving people around to different locations to make it look like there’s not as many people on the border as we normally see,” the commissioner told The Post. “It’s a political ploy to say, ‘Look, these communities no longer have this problem because we solved it.’ You solved it for that community, but you didn’t solve the problem. You just moved the problem.”
An internal DHS document obtained by NBC News shows DHS’s plan to bus immigrants to Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Houston, Dallas, and other cities. San Angelo is the first small town without the resources to deal with immigrants that has been named as a possible location, critics say.
“They’re not set up to handle it. They don’t have the resources to handle it, they don’t have the [non-governmental organizations] to handle it,” Nettleton said of San Angelo, adding that he predicts many immigrants will end up on the streets for a time after they’re released.
It’s not the first time politicians have turned to bussing immigrants away from the border. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has used state funds and donations to send 65 busloads carrying more than 2,000 people to Washington, DC, since April.
Now, more new American cities and towns away from the border will have to share in the burden border communities have shouldered.
“There’s still a lot of people in these bigger cities around the United States that don’t really think that there’s a ‘border issue’ because they’re not dealing with it, but when they start dumping thousands of them in their backyard, then maybe they will understand that there is a problem,” Nettleton said.
