Despite their distaste for history, both Gov. Greg Abbott and his Florida counterpart Gov. Ron DeSantis are giving Americans a history lesson this week. Their spiteful and costly busing, and now flying, schemes that are transporting migrants across the country, reportedly with misleading promises about jobs and housing, are drawing comparisons to a deceitful and racist interstate busing scheme in the early 1960s.
After DeSantis chartered two flights full of migrants this week from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, the John F. Kennedy Library in nearby Boston shared on Twitter photos of old newspaper clippings and archival material about the Reverse Freedom Rides, when the pro-segregation White Citizens’ Council gave Black families one-way tickets north in an effort to “embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people.” Critics saw it for what it was right away: a shameful political stunt, trafficking in, as one Massachusetts mayor put it at the time, “human lives and misery.”
Angered by the Supreme Court’s decision ending school segregation, Southerners organized the network of citizens’ councils in protest. They met in Mississippi just two months after the decision and earned themselves the nickname “uptown Klan” for their restraint in not lynching people outright, but instead imagining up cruel and racist schemes to assert their own presumed superiority, sometimes with state support.
Already terrorized in the South, some 200 Black people took the chance at a better life up North in 1962 when the White Citizens’ Council enacted its plan. Lela Mae Williams was one of them, tricked into a trip north with the promise that President John Kennedy himself would be there to greet her and her children. After three days on the bus, she arrived outside his summer home in Hyannis, Mass. to discover otherwise. Not only was the president not there, there was no job or housing either.
“Instead,” NPR wrote in 2020 when it shared her story, “Lela Mae and the others were unwitting pawns in a segregationist game.”
Is that the inspiration behind the two buses with 75 to 100 migrants Abbott sent this week — not to be outdone by Florida — to Vice President Kamala Harris’ house in Washington, D.C.?
To hear Abbott tell it, he simply wanted to make sure Harris and President Biden saw the border “firsthand,” with the threat that “there’s more where that came from.”
The total cost of his bus service is above $14 million now, and, as he promises, there’s more where that came from — just check your pockets and the rest of the state services he’s raided for Operation Lone Star.
At a cost of roughly $1,700 per person, Abbott’s busing scheme has skirted questions of legality by maintaining that it’s all voluntary. And in fact, non-profits have done this for years, coordinating with other non-profits to help migrants get closer to family or services they might need. The federal government has also transported migrants on planes to the great dismay of the Biden administration’s critics. But increasingly, reporting suggests that the thousands of migrants getting on Abbott’s buses are lured with false information, or at least misunderstandings, about what waits for them on the other side, including promises of work authorization, housing and other services. And there seems to be little communication with cities and providers — no doubt an intentional oversight to increase the chaos of it all.
ABBOTT’S BUSING strategy has more in common with the Reverse Freedom Rides than it does with the work non-profits have done for years along the border to accommodate shifting flows and needs there.
Yet, it is undeniable that this stunt, beyond serving Abbott’s re-election campaign, has sparked an important and necessary national conversation on our country’s outdated immigration system. The crisis is not the people themselves seeking to solicit asylum in the United States, as Abbott is trying to argue, but rather our inability to adapt a legal immigration system that rests on a 1965 law and that was last significantly updated in 1990 to the rapidly changing needs of 21st century migration.
“We’re in a period of historically high levels of enforcement actions at the border and of more varied flows by nationality and countries from which people are coming to the border and that’s more complicated from an enforcement standpoint,” Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, told the editorial board earlier this year.
Yet, while border enforcement spending has ballooned in the past two decades with little effect on undocumented immigration, an outdated fee-for-service funding model for USCIS, the agency responsible for adjudicating legal immigration cases (including work permits for asylum seekers), has left it understaffed, underresourced and overwhelmed by a backlog numbering in the millions.
Statewide, Abbott’s busing has been viewed with a mix of opinions. A recent poll from Texas Polling Project showed that overall, 52 percent of Texans support Abbott’s busing policy. It’s also what immigration advocates want in some ways.
“You’re actually creating a free program that if a Democrat would have said it, [Abbott] would have gone against it,” Abel Nuñez, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, told the Texas Tribune earlier this month.
