CAPITOL EXPRESS

Gov. Greg Abbott bused thousands of migrants from Texas to DC. Here's what became of them.

- Isabela Dias

EARLY ONE SATURDAY morning in August, some 60 newly arrived migrants-mostly men, and a few families with children and breastfeeding infants-crowd into an activity room at a Washington, DC, church. Their scant belongings, keepsakes from home and tokens from strangers encountered on the journey north, are preserved in transparent Ziplocs and white trash bags. They got here at dawn, after a 1,700-mile, 30-plus-hour road trip aboard two of the more than 150 migrant buses Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has dispatched to the nation's capital in an act of audacious political theater.

One woman asks me in Spanish where she might find a shower, saying she really needs to clean up. Another wonders whether she could get some new shoes because her cheap rubber sandals are falling apart. Others seek diapers and ointment for babies or medicine to relieve a headache. (At the rector's request, Mother Jones is not naming the church or the migrants.)

Sixty-year-old volunteer David Swanson, who works weekdays in the finance department of the Human Rights Campaign, is preparing this morning's breakfast. The first Texas bus arrived in DC on April 13 with about 30 passengers, and the church began receiving migrants in late May. Since then, Swanson has met weary travelers from around the world, Afghans to Venezuelans. He was up at 5 a.m. cooking the first of 130 eggs and eight rolls of pork sausage to accompany melon slices, mandarin oranges, white bread, coffee, and apple juice. He's worried it won't be enough. "Luckily, we had a lot of leftover eggs from last week," he says.

Also present are volunteers from the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, a grassroots coalition that mobilized to meet the incoming buses at Union Station and coordinates with this and other faith-based organizations to help the migrants get to their destinations. "They work like a machine," Swanson says.