The Cuban man stepped wearily off the bus after the long journey to Washington DC, expecting to see an official or a volunteer with information on the next steps for him and his fellow passengers.
Instead, he was greeted by TV news crews. Texas officials had tipped off conservative media – but not anyone who could offer practical assistance – that the latest group of asylum seekers they were unilaterally and controversially dispatching from the US-Mexico border would be dropped off outside US vice-president Kamala Harris’s residence.
“¿Nos usaron entonces?” he later said, frustrated, to volunteer Claudia Tristán when she caught up with the people she was trying to help, she told the Guardian. It translates to “so they used us?”
Tristán is the immigration campaign director for the grassroots advocacy group MomsRising/MamásConPoder, but she also volunteers with a mutual aid group.
Members have been dashing into the nation’s capital pre-dawn to meet the busloads of asylum seekers that the Texas, Arizona and now Florida governors have been sending north without any liaison with the places they end up, in a deepening political, legal and ethical scandal.
On the brisk early fall morning earlier this month, volunteers had been waiting at 6am where the buses normally rolled up. They waited and waited, but no buses. As 7am approached, some volunteers reluctantly had to leave for their day jobs.
Then, Tristán was sent a tweet showing that a bus had suddenly arrived miles away, at the vice-president’s official residence, the US Naval Observatory on busy Massachusetts Avenue, where the buses had never shown up before.
She jumped into her car and raced across town. Her fellow volunteers with the mutual aid group Sanctuary DMV, an organization focused on helping migrants in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, hurried there too.
“It was morning rush hour. The streets were filled with regular commuters heading into work,” Tristán said.
When she made it there, she was the first to arrive with assistance, and the first person she locked eyes with was a bewildered mother holding her baby