El Paso’s mayor defended using charter buses to transport migrants out of the West Texas city, saying that the trips were voluntary and coordinated with officials at the destination.
“We want to make sure that we treat people properly,” Oscar Leeser, a Democrat, said Saturday during an appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. “We want to take them to where they want to go.”
Leeser was attempting to draw a contrast between what his city was doing to alleviate the pressure created by a surge of migrant arrivals and the actions of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has bused them to Democrat-led cities without coordinating with local officials. Over the past month, the border city of El Paso has chartered 87 buses to transport a total of 4,110 people, the vast majority of whom went to New York City, according to a city spokesperson.
New York, Chicago and Washington have asked the federal government for help in dealing with the influx of migrants arriving in their cities after crossing over the Mexican border into the U.S.
New York Mayor Eric Adams said Thursday that the city would open two new “Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers” to provide temporary shelter to asylum seekers when they first arrive in New York. Those centers, which activists have decried as inhumane, are meant to serve as temporary triage locales for up to 96 hours before migrants either meet family or enter one of the city’s five shelter systems.
