Yesterday, a friend attended an event at the St. Anthony Hotel in downtown San Antonio, Texas. He was shocked to find Travis Park, across from the hotel, swarming with young men from Central America. Almost all of them had gangster-style facial tattoos and exuded an aura of menace. A few police officers hovered around the perimeter of the park. Hotel guests appeared apprehensive about this hostile occupation of a public space.
A policeman informed my friend that this scene repeats itself every day. Buses carry hundreds of aliens up from the border and deposit them in Travis Park, where they wait to board Greyhound buses to destinations elsewhere in the States. Most of the invaders come from Honduras and the surrounding highlands. They receive food and shelter from various churches.
This business is not new. According to a report from three years ago, “Travis Park Church opened its doors to 375 migrants on Wednesday night, while 10 others were given shelter by Catholic Charities and the San Antonio Mennonite Church. Around 120 of those migrants were from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They will stay in San Antonio while the City figures out what the next step is…” [emphasis mine] [Congolese Migrants Move Back to Travis Park Church After Hail Storm, WeatherPreppers.com, June 6, 2019].
And that was happening under the Trump administration!
Now the numbers are much higher. “Since April 2021, more than 185,000 migrants have arrived in the city, typically staying only for one to three days, according to the City of San Antonio. The numbers have picked up recently, with the city estimating 19,000 immigrants will come through in June alone.” [‘Unprecedented’ number of migrants coming through San Antonio, by Garrett Brnger, KSAT, June 23, 2022]
The city expects 19,000 migrants will travel legally through San Antonio in June alone.
— KSAT 12 (@ksatnews) June 24, 2022
https://t.co/Jp3Tv8qkD4
The federal government is funding this invasion with $10.8 million to the city of San Antonio, “[to] help foot the bill for providing hotel rooms, food, and a planned processing center.” Luckily for the city (but not for the rest of the country), “the majority go straight to the airport.”
Incidentally, the subsidy to San Antonio is part of $110 million appropriated by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), “President Biden’s plan to provide direct relief to Americans, contain Covid-19, and rescue the economy.”
The modest little square park named after Alamo defender Lt. Col. William B. Travis has become another piece of occupied territory in occupied America. Its Confederate monument came down in 2017, and the city’s official website for the park makes no mention that it ever existed. The obelisk bore the inscription “LEST WE FORGET / OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD.”
As recently as 2013, there was only a scattering of scary drug addicts and mentally ill homeless people (also courtesy of the helpful Methodist church ladies) to keep regular citizens on the other side of the street. Now the public park, a legacy of signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence Samuel Augustus Maverick, is so full of foreign asylum seekers that ordinary taxpayers can’t use it on the Saturday after the 4th of July.
The Great Replacement is the sum of many smaller displacements. And it is speeding up.
