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Advocates, elected officials offer assistance for migrants bused from Texas By City News Service
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ocal officials and immigrant-rights advocates were continuing work Thursday to assist 42 migrants who were bused from the Texas-Mexico border to Los Angeles by Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, who proclaimed his state’s border region “overrun” and hinted that more shipments of immigrants could follow. In a Twitter post Thursday, Abbott proclaimed that the “first bus of migrants” from Texas had arrived in Los Angeles, with the migrants initially taken to Union Station downtown but then moved to a nearby church. “Texas’ small border towns remain overwhelmed and overrun by the thousands of people illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico because of President Biden’s refusal to secure the border,” Abbott said in a statement. “Los Angeles is a major city that migrants seek to go to, particularly now that its city leaders approved its self-declared sanctuary city status. Our border communities are on the front lines of President Biden’s border crisis, and Texas will continue providing this much-needed relief until he steps up to do his job and secure the border.” The immigrants were taken to St. Anthony’s Croatian Catholic Church in Chinatown, and Los Angeles
The Union Station located in downtown Los Angeles, where Texas Gov. Gregg Abbot initially sent 42 migrants before they were eventually moved to a local church. | Photo courtesy of Dietmar Rabich/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Fire Department crews responded to ensure none of them had any medical issues. According to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, the immigrants were on the bus for nearly 24 hours, with some saying they had not eaten or had anything to drink during the journey.
Representatives of the CHIRLA were among the organizations who met with the migrants Wednesday night to offer assistance, along with the nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, which indicated that six of the migrants are of Haitian descent, including a family of three -- two adult
cousins and one adult. “We coordinated with the city (of Los Angeles) and the mayor’s office to make sure these individuals were greeted with dignity and to make sure they received the assistance that they needed,” Daniel Tse, the group’s asylum task force coordinator, told CNN.
The Immigrant Defenders Law Center was also offering assistance. “They’re coming with the hope that they can keep themselves and their children safe. And so instead of treating them as political props, here in Los Angeles, we will treat them with the dignity
that they deserve as human beings,” Lindsay Toczylowski told reporters on Wednesday. The Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley also greeted the migrants at Union Station and offered to help them. “The state of Texas offered transportation to Los Angeles,” Sister Norma Pintel told CNN. “Through coordination, we made sure that the families wanting to go to Los Angeles would have someone that would meet them and provide a place to stay.” The 42 migrants included an estimated 16 children, including some infants. Officials said the migrants came from countries including Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela. Most spent the night at the church, although officials said some were picked up by relatives, and others were trying to make arrangements to travel to other cities. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement calling it “abhorrent that an American elected official is using human beings as pawns in his cheap political games.” “Shortly after I took office, I directed city departments to begin planning in the event Los Angeles was on the See Migrants Page 28
Trapped under trucks By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Kartikay Mehrotra, ProPublica, and Julia Ingram, FRONTLINE This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Series: America’s Dangerous Trucks nside the Battle to Prevent Deadly Crashes It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra.
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Marcos had spent a long day toiling as mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border. Now he was headed home on U.S. Route 281, a long swath
of asphalt that runs parallel to the Rio Grande in this part of Texas. His wife, Irma Orive, was waiting for him. But Marcos, 61, never made it. Big commercial trucks are ubiquitous in this part of the world, an endless stream of massive diesel-powered vehicles ferrying goods across the border, and on his drive
home, Marcos encountered a large truck pulling a 53-foot trailer. The truck edged out of a driveway and began, slowly, to turn left onto the road, blocking traffic in both directions. It was as if someone had erected a big steel wall. Video shows what happened next on that night in 2017. Traveling at more than 40 mph, Marcos’s
Hyundai slammed violently into the larger vehicle and became wedged beneath it. The impact ripped the top half of the car apart. Marcos did not survive. The collision did terrible things to his body, breaking his ribs, lacerating his liver and spleen, snapping his neck and damaging the frontal lobes of his brain, according to
the medical examiner’s report. An investigator with the local police department blamed the collision on the truck driver, who was initially charged with negligent homicide, though charges were eventually dropped. ProPublica and FRONTLINE See Trapped Page 14