Hundreds of migrants being bused to New York may turn into thousands thanks to the selfie trend, Todd Bensman wrote for the New York Post this week.
Smart phones have played a huge role in migration with people in Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela using online sites that “serve as a real-time intelligence network,” Bensman, who is the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, continued:
The network reports up-trail conditions, border crossings, violence, smuggling fees, and especially the availability of free stuff like clothes, food and shelter to those who are still down-trail. The intelligence networks don’t just tell with text. They show. Often with photographs and video of real people from the bus stations, on the buses, and in the shelters with their handouts, checks, documents and new clothes.
Phones will show deportation and robbery areas so groups approaching can avoid them. The devices also show where migrants will be welcomed and where to obtain giveaways, according to Bensman.
A bus carrying migrants from Texas arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal on August 10, 2022 in New York. (YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)
“If immigrants are showing up to the same New York homeless shelters and nonprofit storefronts where free goods and assistance is being handed out, you can be sure that all of that information is making it back to the Texas border and beyond, influencing decisions to head for the Big Apple on Abbott’s buses,” he continued.
A bus carrying migrants from Texas arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal on August 10, 2022 in New York. (YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)
During an interview earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said his state would continue sending buses full of migrants to northern cities until Joe Biden’s administration enforced laws at the border.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott tours the US-Mexico border at the Rio Grande River in Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 23, 2022. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
He said, “We are helping out these small local communities by sending even more buses to these communities and putting these new migrants on the buses and sending them to Washington, DC. And we’re looking at other cities to send them to.”
Meanwhile, CNN aired a report this week about Texas busing migrants to New York City and D.C. by the network’s National Correspondent Gary Tuchman.
However, an advocate denied people were being forced to take the trip and migrants said they were grateful.
In the report, Tuchman said, “Each passenger we talked to [said] they appreciate getting the air-conditioned bus ride to what they hope is a much better road ahead.”
Meanwhile, agents in the five Texas-based Border Patrol Sectors stopped over 118,000 migrants after they illegally crossed the border last month, Breitbart News reported August 11.
Abbott responded by expanding the busing operation to include the so-called “sanctuary” city of New York.
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