It all seemed like a gimmick at first. A chartered bus from Del Rio, Texas, with 24 migrants on board arrived at Union Station in Washington on April 13, 2022. More buses would soon be headed there and elsewhere.
Those arrivals were the opening salvo in an effort by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, to draw the nation’s attention to its overwhelmed southern border — a move that was immediately denounced for using undocumented migrants as political pawns and dismissed by Democrats in Washington as a crass stunt. The governor’s migrant busing effort ultimately transported at least 119,000 migrants to cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, and appears to have mostly wound down earlier this year.
In hindsight, it may have helped Donald Trump win the White House again.
With the program, Governor Abbott pulled off something Trump himself had wanted to do in his first term but abandoned, in part, over legal concerns. If Trump rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to the Oval Office, Abbott helped whip up the storm.
Allies of Abbott, a third-term governor, say he has no interest in going to Washington, as the president-elect assembles his cabinet. But even Democrats who decried his buses as a cynical ploy say the effort profoundly reshaped the politics of immigration in this country — and some are frustrated their party never mustered a stronger response.
“For the first time in history, the border crisis was not limited to border communities,” said Andrea Flores, a former director of border management on President Biden’s National Security Council. “President Biden provided no counternarrative to an effort by Governor Abbott to use human beings as political pawns.”
‘When we start this, we’ll keep doing it’
Early on in the administration, Flores said, a team of Biden appointees knew they would most likely need to rely on northern cities to resettle the migrants who were flooding the border. They mapped out a plan that would have allowed the Biden administration to do such resettling in collaboration with mayors. But it didn’t go anywhere, she said — and migrants kept arriving.
Abbott was not available for an interview. His longtime strategist, David Carney, said the idea for the migrant buses came out of a meeting Abbott held with local officials near the border, where one of them asked if the governor could pay for them to transport migrants to bigger cities in Texas.
Abbott decided to send them even farther.
“The most important part of this was, ‘When we start this, we’ll keep doing it,’” Carney said. “Everyone thought this was a one-time gimmick. And then buses kept flowing.”
My colleagues — J. David Goodman, Keith Collins, Edgar Sandoval and Jeremy White — documented how the buses Abbott deployed from April 2022 to June of this year sent thousands of migrants from Texas to a number of cities: more than 40,000 to New York, 33,700 to Chicago and 17,500 to Denver.
Mike Banks, a former Border Patrol agent who now serves as Abbott’s “border czar,” told me the goal of the operation was to “protect Texas.” When I asked him if he thought it had changed the way the rest of the country viewed migration, he said it had.
“It kept it on the forefront of their minds,” Banks said, referring to polling that showed immigration loomed large for voters, and that many supported Trump’s hard-line immigration stances, like mass deportations and the building of a border wall.
“I absolutely believe that what we were doing opened the eyes of many Americans who normally, you know, don’t see what’s taking place in the border and in border towns, they only hear about it,” Banks said.
Other Texas Republicans are more direct about the operation’s political versus practical effects.
“Did it really make a dent in our illegal immigrant population? Maybe,” said Allen Blakemore, a Republican political consultant and lobbyist in Texas. “But it highlighted the situation and certainly captured the imagination of the whole country.”
Inflaming blue cities, and blaming Biden
Abbott was not the only Republican governor moving migrants around the country. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made headlines for flying a group of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas. Former Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona also bused migrants out of his state and his Democratic successor transported migrants, too. And many of the migrants arriving in big cities were traveling there by other means.
But Abbott’s buses, which local officials often complained arrived with little notice, touched off larger frustrations as migrants arrived in cities that strained to manage the influx. By September 2023, Mayor Eric Adams of New York warned that the issue would “destroy” the city, and complained that the local government hadn’t received enough federal help.
“We’re getting no support on this national crisis,” Adams said at the time.
Republicans pounced on his complaints as a way to blame Biden for the crisis, while also using the aid and temporary shelter the cities provided to migrants to stoke divisions among voters.
“You had Adams using the bully pulpit of the New York City media market to echo Trump’s immigration and fear-mongering and attacks on Democrats,” said Bill Neidhardt, a Democratic political strategist. “I think it fundamentally shaped the discourse around immigration to Trump’s benefit.”
Trump performed better in 2024 than he had in 2020 in New York, Chicago and Denver, while Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed in each city compared with Biden. But Democrats in those cities believe it wasn’t about votes locally — it was about manufacturing negative headlines that would land in battleground states and beyond.
“In Denver, we would never tell you it was easy, we’d never tell you it wasn’t a strain, we’d never tell you that our response was perfect,” said Jon Ewing, a spokesman for Mayor Mike Johnston of Denver. Ewing said he believed the city’s experience with migrants became political fodder in other places.
“I think those headlines really got into people’s heads,” he said.
In August, my colleague in Texas, J. David Goodman, reported that the state had stopped busing migrants in late June. A Biden administration order that month had limited the number of migrants released into the country after crossing the border illegally — meaning the state no longer had enough migrants to send.
Abbott nevertheless talked up his buses onstage at the Republican National Convention in mid-July, saying they “will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.”
It was good politics in that arena, even if it didn’t quite reflect the reality on the ground at the time.
THE MOMENT
‘We changed the world!’
Luzerne County is one of many counties in Pennsylvania — and across the country — that shifted to the right this year. Philip Montgomery, a photographer whose work examines the fractured state of America, and Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, spent two weeks there before and after the election to understand what’s driving these changes. Here’s one image that tells the story of what they found — although I recommend taking in their whole project.
The morning after the election, some Bikers for Trump gathered to celebrate at D’s Diner, in the Wilkes-Barre suburb of Plains Township. A man they did not know, a retired financial planner named Kim Pace, approached their table. He began by saying that his wife did not think it was a good idea to talk to them. He had voted for Harris.
“Congratulations, guys,” he said. “I hope it all works out.” His tone suggested he was doubtful.
Dave Ragan, a U.S. Army veteran who had arrived on his motorcycle, stood up to respond. “We changed the world!” he said. “I don’t have to worry about my stepdaughter having a boy in the locker room.”
“Let me tell you something,” Pace said. “That stuff is overblown.” He wished them well and left. Away from the table, he said, “If Harris had won, there was going to be trouble.”
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