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
