Texas Gov. Spent $221 Million on Migrant Busing 'Political Stunt'

Since April 2022, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has spent over $221 million in taxpayer money transporting nearly 120,000 migrants to six Democrat-led cities outside of the state, the Washington Examiner revealed Thursday.

"That's roughly $1,841 per person," noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has previously criticized Abbott's "dehumanizing" bus scheme and other elements of the governor's Operation Lone Star.

"By comparison, a bus ticket to New York costs about $215, while a flight costs about $350," he highlighted. "It would have WAY cheaper to just give migrants money for tickets. Abbott's effort not only made it a political stunt, it lined a contractor's pocket."

As the conservative Examiner reported:

A public information request filed to the Texas Division of Emergency Management showed that the state made more than 750 payments totaling $221,705,637 to transportation companies since the start of operations in April 2022 and August 2024.

Nearly all of the costs were picked up by the state's 30 million residents, with a small portion, $460,196, donated from outside parties. Less than 1% of the $221 million was picked up by nontaxpayers.

The Examiner noted that the almost 120,000 migrants bused north are a "small number" of the more than 5.3 million people who crossed the southern border illegally but have been allowed to remain in the United States since January 2021, according to a U.S. House Judiciary Committee draft report the outlet exclusively obtained earlier this year.

While the busing reportedly stopped earlier this summer due to lack of demand, Abbott's office said last month that since 2022, his taxpayer-funded scheme had transported over 45,900 migrants to New York City, 36,900 to Chicago, 19,200 to Denver, 12,500 to Washington, D.C., 3,400 to Philadelphia, and 1,500 to Los Angeles.

"The overwhelming majority of migrants didn't want to stay in Texas. They wanted to go elsewhere. So if the question was the most efficient way to help them leave the state, the answer would be just buy them tickets and not pay millions to bus them to NYC," Reichlin-Melnick said Thursday. "They are able to live wherever they want while they go through the court process. It's just that many people used up every last cent to get here, so a free bus from Abbott was a very enticing option."

"I've been on record saying that most migrants were extremely happy with the free buses. Despite a lot of lies out there about migrants being bought tickets, the reality is that nearly all migrants have to purchase transportation away from the border, making free buses a godsend," he added. "The problem with the buses has always been that they weaponized migrants by going to only a small handful of politically charged locations (regardless of where migrants wanted to go), and that they were a big waste of money given the cheaper option of donating bus/plane tickets."

In addition to the busing stunt, Abbott has come under fire in recent years for installing razor wire and buoys—which critics called "death traps"—in the Rio Grande as well as signing a pair of anti-migrant bills that Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, described as "deeply harmful and unconstitutional."

According to a New York Times investigation published in July, over half of the migrants bused out Texas were initially from Venezuela—a South American nation enduring not only ongoing political turmoil but also U.S. economic sanctions that, as hundreds of legal experts and groups wrote last month, "extensively harm civilian populations" and "often drive mass migration."