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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Since August 5th, hundreds of asylum seekers and migrants have arrived by bus in New York City from the US Mexico border. Their arrival is part of a plan organized by Texas Governor, Greg Abbott. Abbott claimed in a recent interview with KRIS 6 News in Corpus Christi that this merely an attempt to help small border towns deal with the high number of people passing through from Mexico, but the Governor also signaled a more political reason.

Governor Greg Abbott: [unintelligible 00:00:33] a byproduct of being eye-opening for liberal leaders in places like Washington, New York, now the country is seeing something that we've been dealing with every single day.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm joined now by WNYC's Arun Venugopal. Thanks for coming back on the show, Arun.

Arun Venugopal: Great to be here, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. Who are the people who are arriving?

Arun Venugopal: Well, they are migrants who are leaving number of different countries, primarily in Central and South America. I think the biggest numbers, as I understand it, are coming from Venezuela, which has had one of the world's largest refugee crisis, six, seven million people who've left that country due to an economic crisis. They've made their way up along with people from Columbia, Ecuador, other countries. They've made their way up through Central America, through Mexico, and to the border, where they've sought asylum.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given that they are asylum seekers, is there international or national law here in the US that would dictate how they ought to be treated.

Arun Venugopal: Yes. They certainly should be processed and given the right to prove their asylum claims. What's happening is the process is being disrupted, and part of that disruption, according to advocates, is that they're being sent to places around the country without their informed consent. Officials in Texas are putting them on these buses or telling them to go to Catholic charities in Midtown, in Manhattan, and they arrive here without any coordination.

That's what's really broken down traditionally this coordination between these border states and other locations like New York, where they may be receiving migrants on an ongoing basis. This is something that happens all the time, but it's happening in much greater numbers now and it threw off New York City officials and nonprofit groups who may have been used to this, but now are receiving much greater numbers without any real sense of why these people are coming. Now they seem to have some sense that it's because of politics.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Help me understand your point about informed consent. What are individuals or families being told about where they're going, and what's going to greet them when they arrive?

Arun Venugopal: Well, there's a form called a Notice of Removal Proceedings, and this is something that each one of these individuals has received. I've been shown one of these by a nonprofit group, an immigration rights organization, where they say, "Look," and they redacted certain information that was sensitive, basically like this is where you can see the address that has been put down, "Here's the organization, it's us, Catholic charities, for instance, in New York City. These migrants maybe put on a bus and told, "You're going to go here to New York City."

Now, the problem is that, A, the receiving organization doesn't have any idea that that's the case, the individual doesn't really understand why this is the case. Either they're told, "Oh, your removal proceedings are going to be in the Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan." Actually, they have perhaps a relative in Florida, or in Atlanta, or in LA, where they want to be able to stay with them and be helped in navigating the system in America. This may take months or years for them to acclimate.

This is throwing off traditional patterns of how people come here and settle down and try to make their claim before eventually either, say, receiving asylum or being told, "No, you don't qualify," and you're going to have to go back to your native country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Arun, New York City Mayor Eric Adams says that the city's homeless systems are at capacity and is blaming asylum seekers who've been coming since May. What do you make of this claim?

Arun Venugopal: Well, this is something that's really become both a local controversy as well as something that's playing out on the national stage. The capacity in shelter systems has been dropping for months now and many people have been warning the city that they need to free up more space, find more space for people who are entering the homeless system prior to this migrant bus scenario that we're seeing play out.

They've received a lot of warnings. Now many advocates say that they're using the migrant crisis as a way to deflect accountability, deflect blame from the larger situation of housing, which with the pandemic, a lot of people lost their jobs, many of them had-- There's an eviction moratorium, which has lapsed, and so a lot of people are being thrown out of their homes due to skyrocketing rents. There's all these different factors that have to do with a much larger local political problem. There are certainly hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, according to city, who have arrived in the city, but that is only one part of a much larger problem

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given this larger problem, what are the conditions that are facing folks when they do find themselves in these shelters?

Arun Venugopal: Well, there are people who are, I guess, being helped by local nonprofit organizations, mutual aid groups, like, say, the South Bronx Mutual Aid group, which arrives at the port authority early in the morning anytime there's a word that a bus is going to be arriving, and as you can imagine, these people have spent perhaps months in a journey, they're just physically exhausted, emotionally rattled. Who knows what other problems they're dealing with in terms of trauma? These people are taken into the system, helping them find their place.

Some of these are families, they may be mothers. Many of them are young adult men who've made that journey. Sometimes you have families being separated in terms of where they can settle down in the shelter system. It can be very confusing. There's, of course, some huge language barrier often, but some people are making their way with the help of city officials or these nonprofit groups to homes, to private homes. Sometimes through relatives, sometimes they're being redirected from New York to, say, Charlotte or to Chicago where they originally intended to go. It's a very complicated and moving situation, but there are people who are trying to make it a little less convoluted.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I know you've been reporting on this, you've been talking with folks, what are you hearing from migrants who are in this circumstance?

Arun Venugopal: I've only spoken to one or two. I think some of them, they speak to this really painful journey that they've made. First of all, just to make the decision to leave the only country they've ever known, say, Venezuela, the sacrifices that that entails, leaving children behind perhaps. I met one person who had carried his 11-year-old daughter the whole journey because she has scoliosis and multiple sclerosis, so she's not capable of walking on her own. People who are literally caring people, sometimes multiple children. You hear hundreds, if not thousands of miles, through extremely dangerous and hostile territory at times to get here.

This speaks to what they're willing to do to get to less dangerous situation. Now, whether their conditions that they're leaving qualify for asylum is a whole another thing because there are very specific requirements to qualify for asylum. Have you been persecuted, you fear harm based on race, religion, politics. Those things a judge in the United States will have to decide. These people right now, they're just trying to settle down to some situation where they have basic sustenance, clothing. All their stuff has been taken from them at the border and now they're simply trying to begin a new chapter in their life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Final question for you. [chuckles] Given that this has been going on over the course of this month, it's my understanding that the tide of this has not slowed. Should we expect federal intervention to engage with this question or will the politics of it quiet down? What are your thoughts about what's next in this?

Arun Venugopal: I think that a lot of people feel that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has-- even people on the left side of the aisle think he's done something very politically-savvy by forcing this issue onto states like New York, which seemed to have been caught off guard. Mayor Adams seems to have been caught off guard, and that's not just because of this, but because of, again, local politics and what he's dealing with on housing crisis over here.

Of course, Governor Greg Abbott is involved in a very tight race trying to hold onto his seat. He's competing against Beto O'Rourke. He may finally prevail, but he's certainly been able to use this, I think, to his advantage. It also points to failings or shortcomings in who controls the border and whether the Biden administration can actually get a handle on what's happening there because it certainly does involve CBP, Customs and Border Patrol officials and not just Texas officials in terms of how these people are getting on buses heading to somewhere that they don't want to go against their will and throwing this entire system into doubt. I think the Biden administration is going to have to get a better handle on this and it's not just a matter for local states like New York or others to really grapple with on their own.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Arun Venugopal is race and justice senior reporter at WNYC and Gothamist. Thanks so much for being here.

Arun Venugopal: Thanks, Melissa.

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