Texas Could Be Busing Migrants to Bigger
Cities in South after Chattanooga Disaster

Capitol Inside
August 17, 2022

The historic Texas migrant busing service has sprung a major leak on the roads to New York City and Washington D.C. with countless numbers of passengers ending their trips at stops along the way like the city of Chattanooga in southeastern Tennessee on the Georgia line.

Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly announced Tuesday night that the Texas charter bus operation informed local leaders that it would no longer be routing migrant buses from Texas through the city where dozens have emerged in the past few days after opting to end their trips before reaching original destinations in NYC or DC.

"Most of these folks are headed somewhere else," Kelly told the city council at an emergency meeting last night. "A lot of them are trying to get to the airport. These are all migrants to our knowledge that have been screened by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who are legally seeking asylum. I think most, the best we could tell, are from Venezuala."

Governor Greg Abbott has been mum up to now on the problems that have erupted in Chattanooga in a development that city officials there are characterizing as an unintended consequence of the migrant busing scheme that he initiated in April with excursions to Washington D.C. initially and expanded to NYC this month.

"It's clear to me that the governor of Texas did not intend on having a bus that dropped folks off along the way," Chattanooga chief of staff Joda Thongnopnua said. "He wanted to make a splashy political statement in New York or Washington. It was not, in my personal opinion, the most well-planned endeavor. But I think that's part of the reason why maybe they changed their route."

A decision by the Irving-based charter firm Wynne Transportation to bypass Chattanooga on buses from the Texas border means that migrants will have the opportunity to get off buses in larger Tennessee cities like Memphis and Nashville en route to NYC or Atlanta, Georgia or the Alabama metros Montgomery and Mobile for people who were traveling to DC.

The chaos that Texas has transported to Chattanooga is the first major trouble sign for a Texas initiative that is effectively busing migrants to cities and rural areas across the eastern part of the United States. Texas officials probably can expect that Chattanooga won't be the last based on the fact that the charter drivers are incapable of stopping migrants from leaving buses when and where they choose.

Chattanooga Chief Equity Officer Tamara Steward said a significant number of the migrants who've shown up there since late last week never planned to go all the way to Washington D.C. or New York City. "In many cases what we saw was that they were trying to get closer to that appointment location, so it could be any number of locations that they're trying to get to," Steward said.

Thongnopnua told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that the Hamilton County seat is located within a half day drive of half the entire population of the U.S. - making it a natural dropping off point for migrants who are ready to get off buses after traveling more than 18 hours from south Texas.

Abbott - whether by calculation or coincidence - hasn't specifically mentioned the migrant busing plan on Twitter since reports began emerging five days ago on the crisis that Texas has created and fueled in Chattanooga. The governor had been tweeting frequently about the program in the first two weeks of August when he was engaged in a war of words with New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

But Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick warned in a Fox News interview on Monday that Texas could on the verge of sending buses filled with migrants to other major U.S. cities that are controlled by Democrats. Patrick didn't mention the migrants who were getting off buses in places like Georgia and Tennessee.

more to come ...