El Paso, TX—Eric Mena covered his sleeping little daughter Sofia with a blanket as he sat on a park bench, prepared to wait so long as it took for a free ride to New York.
Mena, 28, said he arrived here three days ago at the epicenter of the crisis on the southern border, where the city’s mayor Oscar Leeser declared a state of emergency last week as hundreds of migrants arrived in El Paso from across the border.
Mena, a shoemaker, said other migrants told him the city offered free bus rides to New York and Chicago. Mena said he wanted to join his brother in Paterson, NJ, and a free ride was his only hope of getting there.
“I have no money and they told me to wait outside the bus station for someone to include bus tickets,” he said, adding that the family was robbed of greater than $300 on a bus and foot trip from Ecuador that took over a month.
“I carried my little girl on my shoulders as we crossed the Rio Grande,” Mena said, adding that the family – his wife Nicole and 7-year-old son Jadiel – arrived in the United States earlier this week in the early hours of the morning and gave themselves to customs agents and protection of the US borders on the US side.
![The Biden administration claimed the border situation was under control.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/migrants-nyc-el-paso-02.jpg?w=1024)
Leeser, a Democrat whose city was overwhelmed with South and Central American migrants throughout 2022, sent hundreds of migrants by bus to New York and Chicago this fall, but stopped the program after the city ran out of cash.
“The buses are state-sponsored,” said a spokeswoman for the city of El Paso. “The buses are a part of the requests we now have made for transport support. Each transported person/family is informed about the destination. Nobody is transported unless they so wish.”
The state of Texas also bused hundreds of migrants out of the state to sanctuary cities including Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia at a value of about $100,000. not less than $14 million to date.
For normal U.S. residents wishing to travel from El Paso to New York City, a one-way ticket for the 52-hour Greyhound bus costs between $219 and $539, with a flight costing around $319. Tickets to Chicago began at $209 on the bus and cost just $153 on low-cost airlines.
Since a state of emergency was declared in El Paso over the weekend, buses run by Texas Governor Greg Abbott have been sent into the city to carry migrants to destinations outside of Texas.
![El Paso declared a state of emergency this weekend.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/migrants-nyc-el-paso-03.jpg?w=1024)
Nellie Burgos, 52, who also arrived in El Paso from Ecuador a couple of days ago, said a Catholic charity told her her buses to New York and Chicago were free and that she would wish to get funding from her family or charity to other destinations in the United States.
But Burgos said she was not eager about either city and was waiting for her Venezuelan daughter-in-law to come out of US custody together with her two children to join her son in San Antonio, Texas. The family crossed the border together, but Burgos’s daughter-in-law and two grandchildren are still in custody, she said.
Burgos was camped on the corner of Chihuahua and Overland Streets with dozens of other recently arrived migrants, next to the downtown bus station. She was guarding a pile of toys she had received from a neighborhood charity for her two grandchildren and hoped they might be released from immigration detention before Christmas.
![Mena said he wanted to join his brother in Paterson, NJ, and a free ride was his only hope of getting there.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/migrants-nyc-el-paso-01.jpg?w=1024)
“I’m grateful for every little thing,” she told The Post, adding that she and her husband Luis were trying to get into certainly one of the overcrowded shelters in the city when the temperature dropped to minus twenty degrees in the evenings.
El Paso sees up to 2,400 people trying to enter the US day by day in response to the imminent end of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that enables US border agents to turn people back to Mexico as an alternative of allowing them into the US.
The policy was due to expire on Wednesday, but Supreme Court Justice John Roberts temporarily froze its termination after an appeal Monday by a gaggle of Republican-led states.
![Title 42 is a Trump-era policy that allows US border agents to send people back to Mexico instead of allowing them into the US.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/migrants-nyc-el-paso-04.jpg?w=1024)
Like many other migrants interviewed by The Post, Burgos and Mena said they might be completely satisfied to cross into the US before the end of Title 42, as they’d heard that it will be harder to enter the US once the COVID policy was lifted. When it’s over, migrants can be processed pod as an alternative title 8, which may have more serious consequences, including deportation.
“Everyone was rushing to get here before the end of Title 42,” said Xavier Ardilles, an electrician who arrived from Venezuela a couple of days ago. “We heard about Title 42 once we were roaming the jungle in Darien. Everyone was terrified and apprehensive they would not make it on time.” The Darien Gap is a dense patch of rainforest between North and South America.
Ardilles and his cousins traveled from their hometown in Trujillo State. They told The Post they were members of an opposition political party and wanted to ask for asylum in the US. “If we return to Venezuela now, they may torture us and put us in prison,” he said, adding that he can also be afraid of returning to Mexico, where authorities are sending migrants to a middle in Chiapas near the Guatemalan border.
Ardilles and his cousins Carla Hernandez and Glenny Garcia, each teachers, also want free bus tickets to New York. They said the trio had close friends in New Jersey.
“Immediately we do not know what to do,” Hernandez said. “We’re stuck here.”