To trace the origins of busing migrants to Chicago, start with Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz

In the second year of his presidency, Donald Trump’s staff considered transporting migrants from the U.S. border with Mexico to Democratic strongholds of his political enemies, including the district of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The 2018 proposal was quickly rejected by federal immigration officials. It’s just a footnote in Trump’s efforts to clamp down on immigration. But the former president’s political DNA infused the idea to flood Chicago, New York and other Democratic cities with asylum-seekers.

Three years earlier, in 2015, then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican running for president, had tossed out the idea on CNN: “If Democrats and particularly some of the candidates for president are so intent on getting Syrian refugees, let’s ask Hillary [Clinton] how many are going to Chappaqua [the New York hamlet where the Clintons had a home] … Let’s put some in Lafayette Park right across from the White House.”

The idea took on steam in conservative circles in 2021, when then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., floated similar suggestions.

Then in 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, another Republican, sent the first busload of migrants from his state to Washington, D.C., paving the way to transport tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to Chicago and other cities.

To trace the beginnings of that movement, the Chicago Sun-Times spoke with some of the key decision-makers in Illinois and Texas at the time about the early months of Texas’ continuing program to export migrants to Democratic cities. Among them:

• Luis Saenz, who was Abbott’s chief of staff from 2017 until the end of 2022 and says that, after Texas sent the first bus to Washington in April 2022, he spoke with people on the Texas-Mexico border every day about their wishes to move migrants out. He remembers Texas’ migrant busing program changing his job overnight. “It’s a big state,” Saenz said. “There are a lot of other issues. But every day you woke up, it was priority No. 1. I think every judge, every mayor, every sheriff had my cell number. And I took all their calls, all their meetings, everything when they needed something. And a lot of the local officials — 95% of them Democrats — were like, ‘You’ve got to help us.’ They didn’t want them there. They didn’t have the capacity.”
  
• Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who says he didn’t anticipate how enormous the migrant issue would become for him and Illinois. “I did not regard it as a threat. Even when the first buses arrived, I just viewed it as a stunt and did not think this was going to be 40,000 people arriving. Because how would you know? And they certainly weren’t telling anybody,” Pritzker said of Texas officials.
  
• Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said: “In those early days, we really didn’t get much in the way of a heads-up. We didn’t know anything about numbers, who was on the manifest of these buses, what their situation was, who they were, what their countries of origin were, what, if any, medical needs. We really got next to no information. It was like an ambush. That’s what it felt like.”

The idea appears to have germinated in Trump’s White House. In a Nov. 16, 2018, email, White House staffers asked officials in federal agencies whether migrants could be arrested at the border and bused “to small- and mid-sized ‘sanctuary cities,’” the Washington Post has reported.

It was discussed in 2018 in staff meetings but not in senior-level meetings, according to a former Trump administration official.

The aim was twofold: Deal with a shortage of detention space and also send a message to Democrats that they would have to share the burden of dealing with waves of migrants.

But U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials strongly rejected the proposal.

Pelosi, whose San Francisco congressional district was one of the areas Trump staffers intended to target, said through a spokesperson that “using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.”

After the Post’s story ran April 11, 2019, Trump tweeted that he was still giving the plan “strong considerations.” Later, he said Democrats in liberal cities should accept migrants with “open arms.”

“California is always saying, ‘We want more people,’” Trump said. “We can give them a lot. We can give them an unlimited supply.”

But the proposal remained on the shelf.

In an interview with the Sun-Times, Chad Wolf, former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security from November 2019 to November 2020, said he wasn’t surprised about Abbott’s decision to move migrants to sanctuary cities.

“It made sense. Because it’s a logical next step from what we’ve seen occurring over the last several years.”

Gavriil Grigorov, AP Photos

In 2021, new life was breathed into the idea when Carlson mentioned it at least three times on his show.

“How are the migrants getting here? Well, they’re walking across, they’re flying from countries all over the world to do that,” he said on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on July 22, 2021.

“The Biden administration, in many cases, is flying them to other parts of the country using the U.S. military, using Air Force bases,” Carlson said. “What they’re not doing is moving these illegal migrants to Aspen or Northwest D.C. or Martha’s Vineyard. Of course not. They’re moving them to places where you live — and to places that didn’t vote for Joe Biden.”

On Sept. 1, 2021, Carlson said Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, was “a perfect place for them to go.”

On his show, Carlson frequently observed that former President Barack Obama had a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Carlson couldn’t be reached for comment.

J. Scott Applewhite, AP Photos

Cruz, the senator from Houston, picked up the ball. On the Senate floor, he warned of tens of thousands of migrants flooding across the Texas border from Mexico.

“It’s easy for Democrats to say, ‘Well, that’s not my problem,’ ” Cruz said on Sept. 23, 2021. “It’s easy for Democrats to say, ‘I’ve never been to Del Rio. Why do I care about those folks in South Texas?’ I ask you: How would this issue be different if those illegal immigrants, if their point of entry was Martha’s Vineyard? How would this issue be different if their point of entry was Silicon Valley — perhaps right outside the headquarters of Google?”

The next month, Cruz introduced an immediately dead-in-the-water piece of legislation he dubbed the Stop the Surge Bill, which would have required the federal government to relocate migrants from south Texas to newly designated ports of entry in 13 Democratic strongholds, including Martha’s Vineyard, Newport, Rhode Island, and Palo Alto, California.

Cruz’s spokesman didn’t respond to written questions.

Not to be outdone, DeSantis jumped into the fray, saying he’d ask Florida legislators for $8 million to create a new program to allow the state to hire companies to transport “unauthorized aliens” out of Florida.

“It’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it is true,” DeSantis said on Dec. 10, 2021. “If you sent them to Delaware [Biden’s home state] or Martha’s Vineyard or some of these places, that border would be secure the next day.”

DeSantis’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman via AP

By that time, migrants were pouring across the Texas border, according to Saenz, Abbott’s former chief of staff, who said he recalled flying from Austin with Abbott and other state officials to Del Rio, Texas, site of the Del Rio International Bridge. They met with hundreds of people there, including law enforcement officials, politicians and ranchers, about what he described as the problems the surge of migrants was creating.

He said he spoke with State Department officials, who warned that 18,000 migrants a day were expected to cross the Texas border because of changes in federal policy. He said he seethed when those officials told him that blocking the migrants from entering the United States didn’t square with “our values.”

“They had no plan in place to manage the tidal wave of people who would come when they put out the welcome mat,” Saenz said. “And they still don’t.”

Early on, Abbott wanted to charter airplanes to fly migrants from Texas to Democrat-run cities, Saenz said, but his staff told him border towns like Del Rio and Eagle Pass couldn’t accommodate large enough planes and that the flights would be too costly.

So he switched to the idea of putting them on charter buses, according to people close to his administration, who said Abbott made sure that forms were printed in multiple languages for migrants to give their consent to voluntarily go to other cities — in part to keep the federal government from prosecuting Texas officials on human-smuggling charges.

On April 6, 2022, Abbott said in Houston that he would bus migrants to the U.S. Capitol, “where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.”

Months later, a bus chartered by the state of Texas rolled into Chicago on Aug. 31, 2022, carrying 79 migrants, most of them from Venezuela.

By the end of August, Texas had spent nearly $13 million sending busloads of migrants out of that state.

One bus was sent in September 2022 to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Around the same time, DeSantis had migrants picked up in Texas flown first to Florida and then on to Martha’s Vineyard, an effort Abbott later said wasn’t coordinated with his office.

Texas also bused migrants to other cities, including New York, Philadelphia and Denver.

Pritzker, Lightfoot and leaders in other Democrat-run states have called the Texas bus program a “stunt.”

Saenz bristles at that.

“We were not looking for stunts, but looking for solutions,” Saenz said. “Pritzker is full of crap. You want to be welcoming — until you’re not.”

Saenz said he didn’t know whether Abbott was influenced by prior proposals such as the one from Cruz to export migrants from Texas.

Asked where Abbott got his idea to send migrants to Illinois and other states, his spokesman Andrew Mahaleris didn’t respond directly, saying only, “After speaking to border mayors, sheriffs and other local officials desperate for help, Texas began transporting migrants in April 2022 to self-declared sanctuary cities to provide much-needed relief to their overrun and overwhelmed border communities. This support is ongoing, as the Biden administration continues to leave unprecedented levels of migrants in Texas border towns. Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue transporting migrants to sanctuary cities to help our local partners respond to this Biden-made crisis.”

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

In an interview, Pritzker said he was aware in early 2022 that Texas was busing migrants to other cities but said it wasn’t clear that Chicago would become a destination.

He said he recalled Texas sending a bus to the Naval Observatory and thinking, “It made sense to send them in front of the vice president’s house. I’m not saying that was a positive thing. I’m just saying, ‘OK, if you’re trying for a political stunt, do it in Washington, D.C.’

“I know I don’t think I thought at the time that that was going to turn into the humanitarian crisis that it has become” for Illinois and other cities, Pritzker said.

The volume of migrants crossing the border is staggering. Federal agents encountered almost 2.5 million of them at the southern border in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September. That’s up from 850,000 in fiscal 2019 and 1.7 million in fiscal 2021. In the Del Rio sector, including Eagle Pass, the agency processed as many as 4,000 migrants a day, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

More than 35,000 migrants seeking asylum have arrived in Chicago on planes and more than 800 buses between Aug. 31, 2022, and Tuesday, according to city data. Of them, about 12,000 have been resettled, about 13,000 are in shelters and 4,600 were reunited with sponsors, data shows.

Pritzker said Grace Hou-Ovnik, former head of the Illinois Department of Human Services, was the first to alert him about Texas sending a bus to Chicago in late August 2022.

“I was, like, ‘Wait, why is this happening repeatedly?’” said Pritzker, who said he realized there wasn’t enough money in the city and state budgets to address the migrants’ needs. “As the numbers increased, it was clear that the city was not going to stand up enough shelter space and that the state needed to step in because it was a crisis. It became a crisis in a short period of time, say mid-fall” of 2022.

Pritzker said he worried about what would happen after May 11, 2023 — a day “burned in my head.” That was the expiration date for Title 42, the federal coronavirus health order enacted under the Trump administration to allow U.S. authorities to quickly send migrants back to Mexico.

“We all knew that that could mean that there would be a big flow into the country — not knowing if the governor of Texas was going to now flood them into Chicago or to some other location,” Pritzker said.

The Illinois governor said that, in the meantime, migrants were being sent to Denver, which was then sending them to Chicago, which Pritzker called “unhelpful.” He said Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told him, “ ‘We’re not telling people to go to Chicago. They’re just getting off the bus and saying they’d like to go to Chicago.’ I said, ‘Come on. That’s not the case. You know, you guys are buying tickets to Chicago.’ I said to him, ‘We can do the same thing back, and we’re not going to. This is not how we should be operating.’”

Pritzker says Chicago has seen an even bigger influx from New York City: “There’s actually a list that I handed to the mayor of Chicago since he is close to the mayors. I said, ‘Here’s a list of how many people have been sent to Chicago. You should call each mayor, starting with the mayor of New York and tell them, ‘You’ve got to stop doing that.’ ”

He said he told Mayor Brandon Johnson, “This is going to be the biggest thing you face.”

In an interview in early February, Pritzker said he gave Johnson the list Jan. 9. New York is still sending migrants to Chicago.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Pritzker said he never personally reached out to Abbott to talk about the migrant situation.

“My team was reaching out,” he said. “They just said that it was like ‘talking to the hand.’ They just did not want to help. And so we ended up having to figure out what I can only describe as an underground process, where we’re talking to the nonprofit organizations, who weren’t getting any information from the state of Texas but were receiving people.”

Saenz said he couldn’t recall having any conversations with Pritzker’s staff.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

In an interview, Lightfoot said her staff also tried to communicate with Abbott and his team, but they “weren’t responsive.”

Just as Pritzker said the expiration date for Title 42 was burned into his head, Lightfoot instantly recalled Aug. 31, 2022 — the date the first bus came to Chicago. She said she had zero inkling Abbott would send the buses to Chicago.

“I really don’t pay attention to what Greg Abbott says, but obviously I tried to educate myself about the origin of this, how this was funded, because it was a dire emergency in our city,” Lightfoot said.

The costs to the city, county and state are mounting:

• The city’s combined tab for 2023 and budgeted for 2024: $288 million.
• The county: $100 million committed for this fiscal year.
• The state: $638 million in dollars spent and committed.
• And the state and county, the Sun-Times reported Thursday, are proposing another $250 million combined.

By comparison, Texas has spent about $124 million since April 2022 to bus more than 100,000 migrants from the border to Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Denver and Los Angeles, according to data from the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

Lightfoot said Abbott wasn’t the only public official with whom she was furious. She said she couldn’t fathom why El Paso, Texas, Mayor Oscar Leeser, a fellow Democrat, also was busing migrants to Chicago.

“I spent a lot of time trying to understand and try to engage him in conversation about what the heck he was doing and why he was doing this to another Democratic mayor,” Lightfoot said. “I was sympathetic to the crisis that his city was having, but exporting human beings cross country to alleviate a pressure that you’re facing wasn’t solving anybody’s problem.”

“Asylum-seekers are coming to the United States, not to El Paso,” Leeser responded in a statement. “We treat each individual with dignity and respect and assist as best we can within the lawful parameters of current immigration laws in our country. The cities to which they travel are of their choice and not made by the City of El Paso.”

Lightfoot and New York Mayor Eric Adams contacted Polis in January 2023, asking the Colorado governor to “cease and desist” sending migrants to Chicago.

“He didn’t stop until we outed him in public,” Lightfoot said. “We sent him a letter. We released it to the press, and then they decided, ‘Oh, I’m getting bad publicity.’ I mean, it was just, it was the crassest form of politics that I think I’ve experienced in quite a long time.”

Lightfoot said she also gave Johnson some advice on the crisis before she left office.

“I immediately reached out to the mayor-elect and started talking to him again about the issue because we had talked about this briefly before, and urged him and his team to get really engaged, because I didn’t want to be making any decisions 10 days out from leaving office that the incoming administration was going to have to live with,” she said.

Lightfoot reserved some of her criticism for the Biden administration, which she says needs to make policy changes to grant more work permits to asylum-seekers.

She said she met in Washington in September 2022 with Customs and Border Protection officials to tell them: “‘This is not going to get better. We need a plan. This is a federal issue. It’s not a local issue.’

“To me, the one thing that’s been lacking is getting these folks work permits,” Lightfoot said. “I get the politics but, from a policy perspective, from a decency perspective, allowing tens of thousands of people to come into the country legally but denying them [the] ability to work is unconscionable.

“I think there was some concern that I heard in certain quarters that, if we do that, then it’s just gonna encourage more people to come. People are coming by the thousands, by the tens of thousands.”

But Lightfoot said “it would defuse a lot of the problems, because to stand up these temporary shelter spaces where there’s no outflow of people is not sustainable.”