When the first migrant buses started arriving in D.C. from Texas a year ago this month, the volunteers who came together to welcome the passengers didn’t know when those buses would show up, where they would stop or what the people on them would need.
At one point, volunteers stood on different corners near Union Station, giving one another updates through a group chat.
“I see a bus coming!” a volunteer recalled someone typing, then sending another message: “Oh wait; it’s a middle school field trip.”
But by the time the bus carrying Tiffany Burrow arrived, that had changed. The volunteers were ready in ways that left Burrow encouraged and at one point taking a photo of a wheelchair and its occupant.
The wheelchair was not motorized or impressive in any way, but its existence was telling. It showed how, with coordination and communication, volunteers could work across state lines to meet the needs of migrants.
“We can do this really well,” Burrow recalled thinking the day she saw that wheelchair.
From border town to ‘border town,’ bused migrants seek new lives in D.C. area
In Del Rio, Tex., Burrow is the operations director for the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition migrant processing center, which greets and screens thousands of migrants arriving in the United States each year. After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that the state was going to start sending busloads of migrants to the nation’s capital, state officials asked the nonprofit organization to offer migrants that option.
by Prozco®