Toilets overflowing with human waste and urine running down the aisle are among the deplorable conditions on buses Gov. Greg Abbott is using to ship migrants out of Texas, a whistleblower who oversaw security on the trips told ABC.
A U.S Army veteran David Dillard worked for Mayhem Solutions, a contractor hired to provide security on the bus trips that are a key part of Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s $4.5 billion border crackdown, ABC reports. The Republican governor has transported 60,000 migrants to Democrat-led “sanctuary cities,” he bragged Tuesday on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.
“Additional buses are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice,” Abbott said in his tweet.
Although Dillard told ABC News that he holds “Republican values” and initially supported the busing of migrants, he had a change of heart after witnessing the inhumane treatment they endured on journeys that often lasted 12 hours.
“You got one bathroom and the bathroom, you cannot have No. 2, you can only use for No. 1, but you got women’s tampons, babies’ diapers, everything in that one bathroom,” said Dillard, who at one point was earning $450 a day. “It’ll start overflowing and leaking down the thing. We tell them, stop using it after that.”
Dillard told ABC migrants weren’t given information on where they were going. He also said supervisors told him not to let asylum seekers with phones use the buses’ Wi-Fi hotspots to check where they were heading.
Initially, Dillard give immigrant aid groups in the destination cities a heads-up about buses’ arrival times and how many migrants they carried. However, he said that practice stopped in August 2022 after he and others received an email from a manager instructing them to stop speaking with the aid organizations.
“This job, from day one, was never meant to be done the right way,” Dillard told ABC. “The job, from day one, was just to get people on a bus and out of Texas. That’s it. They didn’t care about their health. They didn’t care about where they were going.”
Mayhem Solutions eventually fired Dillard after a pay dispute. However, he maintains he’s not a disgruntled former employee but rather “disgruntled in the fact that people were treated, [how] humans were treated on my watch.”
It’s not the first time critics have leveled charges of intentional cruelty at Abbott’s busing program. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blasted the governor in August after Texas dropped off a busload of migrants during Tropical Storm Hillary.
“It is evil to endanger the lives of vulnerable migrants by sending a bus with families and toddlers on board to a city that at the time was under an unprecedented tropical storm warning,” Bass said in a statement.
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This article appears in Oct 18-30, 2023.