Less than a week since finding shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, after crossing the Rio Grande, they embarked on another trip Thursday morning: this time to Washington DC, on a bus.
Many, like Figueroa, are happy to leave Texas. The buses stop at several cities along the way to the Northeast, allowing migrants to disembark to reunite with friends and family in other locations. In Washington DC, Figueroa and her husband will meet with their friends.
“We’ve been on the road for so long, we don’t mind two or three more days,” Figueroa, 28, told CNN in Spanish.
Neither do Cousins Luis Pulido and Aynner Garrido, who spent six weeks traveling from Venezuela to Texas. Pulido’s younger brother did not make it to the US with them. He disappeared when the group was swimming across the Rio Grande. Shelter officials in Texas told Pulido they found his brother’s body; he had drowned.
But the cousins have made it this far and are determined to continue with their plans. They will board the bus to DC and will get off before their destination, in Kentucky, where their relatives will be waiting to pick them up.
“They want to go on the buses,” said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of Mission: Border Hope, a non-profit organization which serves the border community in Eagle Pass. “No one has been forced.”
The groups are going in part because they want to, Wheeler added, and in part because it is a free ride to New York or Washington.
“They’ve essentially weaponized this situation,” Manuel Castro, commissioner of the mayor’s immigrant affairs office, said in a recent city council hearing. “We’ve learned that the bus company that they’ve been working with has a nondisclosure agreement that does not allow them to communicate with the city of New York.” Abbott’s office did not answer CNN’s prior questions concerning nondisclosure agreements for bus companies.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also accused Abbott of forcing migrants onto the buses, which the governor has denied.
Back in Eagle Pass, more than 40 people, including men, women and children, boarded the bus headed for DC Thursday morning along with cousins Pulido and Garrido, and Figueroa and her husband.
When she gets there, Figueroa told CNN she hopes to be able to find work cooking, cleaning or in an office, to be able to support her family back home.
