Migrants bused out of NY to evade curbs

Hundreds of migrants have been dropped off in New Jersey to bypass new restrictions recently imposed by New York Mayor Eric Adams, aiming to curb the inflow of bused migrants to the city from the US southern border.

Adams issued an executive order last week requiring charter bus companies to provide advance notice of 32 hours of the arrival of migrants in the city and stipulated that buses can unload migrants only between 8:30 am and 12 pm.

At least four buses transporting migrants to New York arrived at the train station in Secaucus Junction, New Jersey.

On Sunday, Secaucus Mayor Michael Gonnelli said Secaucus police and town officials had been told by Hudson County officials about the arrival of buses at the train station in Secaucus Junction beginning on Saturday. He said four buses were believed to have arrived and dropped off migrants who then took trains into New York City.

The New York Times reported on Monday that 13 buses from Texas and Louisiana carrying about 450 migrants have arrived in New Jersey since Saturday, including Jersey City and Secaucus, Fanwood, Edison and Trenton. The buses had chaperones who assisted migrants to get on trains and buses heading into New York.

Tyler Jones, a spokesperson for New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, said the governor's office has tracked the recent arrival of a handful of buses of migrant families at various New Jersey train stations.

"New Jersey is primarily being used as a transit point for these families — all or nearly all of them continued with their travels en route to their final destination of New York City," Jones said.

"Texas Governor Greg Abbott continues to treat asylum-seekers like political pawns and is instead now dropping families off in surrounding cities and states in the cold, dark of night with train tickets to travel to New York City, just like he has been doing in Chicago," Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Adams, said in a statement.

However, migrants bused to New York City accounted for only a small portion of the total number of migrants arriving in the city. According to numbers provided by Abbott's office, Texas sent more than 28,700 migrants to New York City last year — and a total of 33,600 since August 2022, when the practice first started. New York City has processed more than 161,500 asylum-seekers last year, the Times reported.

Drawing criticism

Abbott's busing of migrants to a few Democratic-dominant cities has received wide criticism at first. However, public opinion has shifted somewhat since the program started in April 2022.

The top-voted comment by an anonymous reader to the Times reads: "This situation at the border is unsustainable and the more people on both sides of the aisle that realize this simple fact, the better."

A record 2.47 million migrants crossed the Mexico-US border last year, and in December, a record of more than 10,000 migrants crossed in a single day.

On Thursday, the US will reopen four legal US-Mexico border crossings as high levels of illegal immigration have receded and freed up personnel, US border authorities said on Tuesday.

The US will resume operations at an international bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas, two crossings in Arizona and another near San Diego, California, the US Customs and Border Protection said in a news release.

Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden's administration asked the US Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene, after a federal appeals court temporarily blocked it from destroying razor wire fencing that Texas has placed along its border with Mexico to deter illegal border crossings.

Agencies contributed to this story.