Dozens of immigrants were sent by buses to Chicago and New York overnight Monday from the US southern border in Texas, hours after the Supreme Court ordered upholding the health regulation known as Title 42.

The Mayor’s Office of the city of El Paso, Texas, which borders Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, announced that it will maintain the state of emergency, declared by the mayor before what was expected to be the end of the rule, which allows the expulsion of the majority of immigrants arriving in the US by land.

“We will continue to proceed as if Title 42 had been lifted,” Mayor Oscar Leeser said at a press conference Monday, after the Supreme Court’s decision was released in Washington DC

Local and federal authorities expected that the suspension of the rule, imposed by the Government of Donald Trump (2017-2021) and maintained by the current president, Democrat Joe Biden, would result in an increase in the number of immigrants arriving in border cities.

As night fell in El Paso, outside the shelter at Sacred Heart Parish in the southwest of the city, a man and a woman wearing Texas State Office of Emergency Management T-shirts and badges began offering immigrants a free bus trip to New York or Chicago, as EFE was able to verify.

Since April of this year, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has been sending dozens of buses with immigrants to cities in the north of the country, with the aim of pressuring President Biden to toughen immigration policies.

Those who ran out of space in the Jesuit shelter, which has a limited capacity for about 150 people, listened carefully to the conditions of the trip.

As the woman explained, only people with US immigration papers could ride. That is, those who turned themselves in to the Border Patrol when crossing the border and not those who crossed it without being detected.

Discouraged after hearing the conditions, many walked away.

“We cannot get involved, they can deport us,” one of the immigrants told EFE, who asked to hide his identity. Head down, he crossed to the other side of the sidewalk, where he spent the night outdoors, with temperatures below 8 degrees Celsius.

He is 22 years old and says he has already crossed almost 16 countries. She left Venezuela three years ago and lived before in Ecuador and Chile, but decided to come to North America to better help her family financially.

Although he is now in the US, he says that his final destination is Canada because, according to what he has read, they are more supportive of immigrants.

“I want to make a little money here and continue,” explained this immigrant to EFE, who was carrying a pink suitcase with a princess design and a black hat. Almost everything he owns, the young man said, was given to him because a group of people stole all his belongings in Ciudad Juárez.

The priest Rafael García, who coordinates the shelter, explained how, in addition to a place to sleep, transportation is the other main need that he sees in immigrants who arrive in El Paso.

“There is a great need for many people who do not have a way to get to the place where they are going to receive them,” stressed the parish priest, who has lived in the border city since 2016.

A bus ticket to Denver or Los Angeles, two of the most populous cities west of El Paso, costs between $90 and $95.

The Supreme Court must decide in the next few days whether or not to keep Title 42 standing while a lower court analyzes the case.

Since it came into effect in 2020, the regulation has allowed the expedited expulsion of more than 2.7 million, according to data from the International Rescue Committee.