EL PASO, Texas — Dozens of immigrants were bused to Chicago and New York on Monday night from the southern U.S. border into Texas, hours after the Supreme Court ordered compliance with the health care regulation known as Title 42.
The mayor’s office of the city of El Paso, Texas, which borders Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, has announced it will maintain a state of emergency, declared by the mayor ahead of what was supposed to be the end of the rule, which allows for the expulsion of most immigrants arrive in the United States by land.
“We will continue to proceed as if Title 42 had been revoked,” Mayor Oscar Leeser said at a news conference Monday after the Supreme Court decision was made public in Washington DC.
Local and federal authorities expected that the suspension of the law, imposed by the government of Donald Trump (2017-2021) and maintained by the current president, Democrat Joe Biden, would lead to an increase in the number of immigrants arriving in border cities .
As night fell in El Paso, outside the Sacred Heart Parish shelter in the southwest of the city, a man and woman wearing T-shirts and Texas State Office of Emergency Management badges began offering immigrants a free bus ride to New York or Chicago, as EFE was able to verify.
Since April of this year, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has sent dozens of buses with immigrants to cities in the north of the country, with the aim of putting pressure on President Biden to tighten immigration policies.
Those who have run out of space in the Jesuit shelter, which has limited capacity for about 150 people, have been listening closely to travel conditions.
As the woman explained, only people with US immigration documents were allowed to travel. That is, those who turned themselves in to the Border Patrol when they crossed the border and not those who crossed undetected.
Discouraged upon hearing the terms, many walked out.
“We can’t get involved, they can deport us,” one of the immigrants told EFE, who asked to hide his identity. Upside down, she crossed to the other side of the sidewalk, where she spent the night outdoors in temperatures below 8 degrees Celsius.
The US National Guard placed wires to avoid crossings
He is 22 years old and says he has already crossed almost 16 countries. She left Venezuela three years ago and lived in Ecuador and Chile before, but decided to come to North America to help her family financially.
Although he is now in the United States, he says his final destination is Canada because, according to what he has read, they are more immigrant-friendly.
“I want to make some money here and continue,” this immigrant explained to EFE, who was carrying a pink suitcase with a princess drawing and a black hat. Almost everything he has, said the young man, was given to him because a group of people stole all of his belongings in Ciudad Juárez.
The priest Rafael García, who coordinates the reception center, explained how, in addition to a place to sleep, transport is the other main need he sees in the immigrants arriving in El Paso.
“There is a great need for many people who have no way of getting to the place where they are going to welcome them”, underlined the parish priest, who has lived in the border city since 2016.
A bus ticket to Denver or Los Angeles, two of the most populous cities west of El Paso, costs between $90 and $95.
The Supreme Court must decide in the coming days whether or not to keep Title 42 standing while a lower court considers the case.
Since it took effect in 2020, the regulation has allowed for the accelerated deportation of more than 2.7 million, according to data from the International Rescue Committee.
