Less than a week after finding refuge in Eagle Pass, Texas, after crossing the Rio Grande, they embarked on another journey Thursday morning: this time to Washington DC, by bus.
Many, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. Buses stop at several towns along the way to the northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet their friends.
“We’ve been on the road for so long, we don’t mind two or three more days,” Figueroa, 28, told CNN in Spanish.
Neither were cousins Luis Pulido and Aynner Garrido, who spent six weeks traveling from Venezuela to Texas. Pulido’s younger brother did not arrive in the United States with them. He disappeared as the group swam across the Rio Grande. Shelter officials in Texas told Pulido they had found his brother’s body; he had drowned.
But the cousins have made it this far and are determined to continue with their plans. They will board the bus for DC and get off before their destination in Kentucky, where their loved ones will be waiting to pick them up.
“They want to get on the buses,” said Valeria Wheeler, executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a nonprofit that serves the border community of Eagle Pass. “No one was forced.”
Groups go there partly because they want to, Wheeler added, and partly because it’s a free ride to New York or Washington.
“They basically weaponized this situation,” Manuel Castro, commissioner of the mayor’s office of immigrant affairs, said at a recent city council hearing. “We learned that the bus company they worked with had a nondisclosure agreement that did not allow them to communicate with New York City.” Abbott’s office did not respond to prior questions from CNN regarding nondisclosure agreements for bus companies.
New York Mayor Eric Adams also accused Abbott of forcing migrants onto buses, which the governor denied.
Back at Eagle Pass, more than 40 people, including men, women and children, boarded the bus to DC on Thursday morning with cousins Pulido and Garrido, as well as Figueroa and her husband.
When she gets there, Figueroa told CNN she hopes to be able to find work cooking, cleaning or in an office, so she can support her family at home.
cnn
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