Greg Abbott’s Migrant Buses Cost $1,841 Per Passenger

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s migrant busing program has reportedly cost taxpayers $221 million to transport nearly scores of asylum seekers to Democrat-run states north of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the Washington Examiner.

The cost amounts to $1,841 per passenger, as revealed through a public information request filed by the Washington Examiner with the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

Since April 2022, Texas has made over 750 payments totaling $221,705,637 to transportation companies.

Newsweek has contacted the office of Governor Abbott for comment.

Almost all of the expenses were covered by the state’s 30 million residents, with only a small fraction, $460,196, contributed by external donors. Less than 1% of the $221 million was covered by non-taxpayers, according to the Washington Examiner.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow, American Immigration Council told Newsweek: “For every one person put on a charter bus, Texas could have used the same funds to provide bus or plane tickets to 4-8 people, depending on their destination and method of transportation. Charter buses were vastly less efficient if the actual goal had been to help people get away from overcrowded border communities and to their ultimate destinations.

“The largest concern with the busing program has always been the use of migrants as political weapons in party politics. There was never an objection to the idea that the government should help some people stuck at the border without the resources to travel further.”

However Republicans declared victory recently when buses stopped transporting migrants out of Texas.

The governor’s policy—sending busloads of migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to Democratic stronghold cities like New York—appears to have come to a standstill.

The buses have essentially stopped running due to a lack of available migrants to send across the country. Abbott had used this policy as a means to pressure the Biden administration.

James Wesolek, an official at the Republican Party of Texas, told Newsweek in August: “Biden’s EO [executive order] authorized over 2,500 illegal border crossings a week. Governor Abbott’s unceasing efforts to secure the border, including razor wire, river buoys, and their subsequent legal battles, is what secured the border.”

Migrant encounters at the Southwest border were lower in July of this year than in July 2023, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection: 104,116 encounters compared to 183,479.

Abbott has taken an aggressive approach to handling the surge of migrants arriving through the U.S.-Mexico border and directed buses to transport them to six sanctuary cities in blue states.

Over 120,000 migrants have been bused to Democratic-led cities such as Chicago, New York, Washington, and Denver since the policy was implemented in April 2022, according to Abbott’s office.

“To help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hoards of illegal immigrants who are being dropped off by the Biden administration, Texas is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, D.C.,” Abbott said in a statement at the time.

“We are sending them to the United States’s capital, where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.”

Originally initiated to address the overwhelming influx of migrants entering Texas, the program aimed to ease the strain on local communities by transporting migrants to cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

In January, New York City Mayor Eric Adams filed a lawsuit seeking over $700 million from 17 transport companies that had bused migrants from Texas to New York City.

Adams contended that Abbott orchestrated a political “scheme” to transport migrants into the city in an attempt to “overwhelm” the city’s social services.

Julia Gelatt, associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, says Abbott’s policy “helped migrants travel more cheaply to the places where they already intended to go.”

“The lack of coordination between Texas officials and destination cities created particular challenges for those cities and for migrants—particularly when health concerns were present.”

“It is difficult to pin the decrease in Texas to any one factor,” she added.

Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe Contents at Refugees International, told Newsweek: “There are not as many people crossing between ports of entry now, and more people who are crossing between ports of entry are being summarily removed because, under the Biden administration’s new border policy, Border Patrol officers don’t ask those they encounter about their fear of being returned to their home country.

“There is also now in place a more coordinated effort by NGOs at the border and by destination cities and NGOs there to help migrants who are arriving, especially through ports of entry using CBP One appointments, how to make their own arrangements to travel to friends and family elsewhere in the country. A humane reception policy requires this kind of coordination between border and destination cities.”

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