A bus carrying 41 migrants from Brownsville, Texas, arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening, the fourth such bus to arrive in the city in recent weeks.
Among the passengers on board were six children, aged between 1 and 15 years.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s administration has sent more than 25,000 migrants across the United States, including to New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC.
More than 80 migrants have been sent to Los Angeles, he said in a July 10 tweet.
Texas has placed giant buoys across the Rio Grande, creating a floating barrier in a desperate attempt to prevent migrant crossings. Construction of the 1,000-foot-long dam began on July 7 in the city of Eagle Pass.
A bus carrying 41 migrants from Brownsville, Texas, arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening.
Buoy barriers are installed and located in the middle of the Rio Grande River on July 18, 2023 in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Four-foot-wide orange buoys are tied together to form barriers and netted to prevent swimming down.
The Los Angeles-based Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights believes the bus carrying the migrants was funded by Texas state officials.
It said about half of the migrants are from Venezuela and the rest from countries including China, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras.
The migrants were first sent from Texas to Los Angeles on June 14 by Governor Abbott, in what Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called a ‘political stunt’.
Immigrants were met by immigration coalitions and other community groups and provided with food, clothing, hygiene kits and consultations with legal immigration attorneys.
They will connect with loved ones or sponsors across the West Coast of the United States.
“We will do everything we can to protect the dignity and safety of these families whenever they arrive,” Angelica Salas, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement.
‘We will work together with other like-minded individuals and entities in Los Angeles to receive these asylum seekers with compassion and dignity.’
Salas called on the Biden administration to provide protections for asylum seekers and increase funding for nonprofits and community groups that help immigrants “while we see more buses arriving in California and other states.”
Asylum seekers walk through an island as they try to cross the Rio Grande River into the United States on July 18, 2023 in Eagle Pass, Texas.
‘We don’t mistake these busing episodes for good intentions,’ Salas said. ‘Texas and Florida have shown a callous disregard for the human experience, particularly as it relates to black and brown-skinned asylum seekers.’
Salas added, ‘Having migrants live somewhere in the middle of a scorching summer is not kind, it’s cruel and unfair.’
Governor Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety have ignored federal government requests for information about the floating buoy wall near Eagle Pass, according to federal officials.
Texas did not consult with the federal government before using the barriers and did not respond to government requests for more information about them, even after raising concerns that they could violate international agreements with Mexico, a State Department spokesman said Tuesday.
Mexico’s top diplomat said on Friday that the nation had sent a diplomatic note to the US federal government about the floating barrier, arguing it could violate the 1944 and 1970 treaties that regulate use of the river.
“The real problem is that President Biden’s open border policy has created chaos at the border that is unsustainable,” said Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary to Governor Abbott.
“It is our constitutional responsibility to do what President Biden is failing to do and that is to respond to this unprecedented crisis.”
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