Comment: Abbott & Co. get what they wanted; a chaotic emergency
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, October 12, 2022
By Fernanda Santos / The Washington Post
He told me he doesn’t remember how he and his mother got from Mexico City to the U.S. border. He was 5. His father was already toiling in the garment factories of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. His two older brothers had stayed behind; there was no money to pay for their trip.
What he does remember, he said, is the thirst he felt as he and his mother walked across the desert borderland, following a group of strangers. For years afterward, his mother would tell the story of how she prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe for water and shade, and how he fell asleep and was no longer thirsty when he woke up.
That was 37 years ago. Today, Manuel Castro is the first formerly undocumented person serving as immigrant affairs commissioner in New York City. He is often the first person to greet migrants — many of them asylum seekers — bused to New York by Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, pawns in a dirty game of political chess.
Castro shakes their hands and bends down to meet children eye to eye, seeing a bit of himself in them and wondering, just as his parents did: Who might they grow up to be?
On Friday, New York’s Democratic Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency to address the flow of migrants bused north by the thousands, straining city resources. The declaration will, among other things, allow relief centers to be established more quickly and seeks state and federal aid.
I met Castro at the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan one recent morning and watched him play a starring role in this migrant drama.
I positioned myself behind a gaggle of television reporters who had been invited to document the moment. We were all penned in behind bright yellow barricades, close enough to witness the action but not allowed to interrupt its flow.
“I’m here to support these people, to restore the dignity taken from them at the border,” Castro said in Spanish, answering a reporter’s question. “But most of all, I’m here because, as someone who crossed the border, I share some of the same experience as these migrants who are arriving and I want them to be treated as they deserve; as human beings.”
Watching what can only be described as a spectacle, I tried to reason with myself. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, can tip off Fox News to the arrival of planes full of migrants he shipped to Martha’s Vineyard. Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, vying for his piece of spotlight, can send migrants in buses bound for the nation’s capital. Abbott, in an election year, can brag about the many migrants he has shipped to New York; 14,600 had gone through the intake process at city shelters as of Sept. 26, one official told me.
Why shouldn’t Castro be free to invite the New York press corps to document the counternarrative he’s trying to establish?
The only people who seem to not have a say in all of this are the bus passengers, who have every right to be in this country until their cases are adjudicated. No one asked whether they want to be filmed and photographed as they disembarked in New York.
The children were the only ones who looked happy as they stepped off the bus that early morning. Maybe the long trip and arriving in the city registered as a big adventure.
A few days after visiting the bus terminal, I sat with three mothers from Venezuela who had been bused north. We met in a church basement near the shelter where they’re staying on the Upper West Side.
The stories they shared haunted me. In their days crossing “la selva,” the jungle between Colombia and Panama, they saw fellow migrants robbed and raped. One told me she saw people drown as they tried to cross the same raging river she had to cross with her children. She doesn’t know how to swim. But somehow, she made it.
New York is anchored by the idea of open arms, hearts and minds. That’s what created the conditions for Castro’s ascent. But more than a city’s benevolence is needed for these new arrivals to succeed. So far, New York’s response has been laudably well intentioned but unavoidably chaotic; as it would be, given that Texas doesn’t even let the city know when buses are coming or how many passengers they hold. City officials have to rely on nonprofit groups at the border to tell them what to expect.
New York’s perennially overcrowded homeless shelter system is bursting at the seams. Hundreds of migrant children have enrolled in a public school system embroiled in a legal fight over budget cuts. Now, an emergency has been declared. Maybe that’s what Abbott — and DeSantis and Ducey — have wanted all along.
Fernanda Santos, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is a journalism professor at Arizona State University and author of “The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots.”
