Catch-and-Bus: Thousands of Freed Border-Crossing Immigrants Are Dispersing Across America
Charters and Greyhound are delivering them where they want to go
By Todd Bensman on March 31, 2021
DEL RIO, Texas — On a recent evening with the night ahead looking long, an idling charter bus parked on a lot prepared to disperse a new kind of import throughout the American landscape.
The bus and a small van nearby were packed with 60 or so mostly Haitian families fresh out of the Rio Grande from their illegal crossings.
After testing negative for Covid and other processing, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had given them legal documents and released them to a local nongovernmental organization, the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, just blocks from the river in this south Texas border town.
For another day or so, coalition volunteers helped them arrange to wire in money for bus tickets and lodging in the cities to which the buses will take them. Like at least 20 other buses that had each carried 50 people in just the first three weeks of March, this one soon rumbled onto the long road from this Texas border town carrying happy, chattering passengers to new American lives in Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach in Florida, as well as Newark, N.J.
https://cis.org/Bensman/CatchandBus-Thousands-Freed-BorderCrossing-Immigrants-Are-Dispersing-Across-America
