Did migrants try to hijack school buses? Here’s what really happened

Shortly after 7 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 28, just as the sun sliced over the mountains east of San Diego, Guadalupe Dukes and her 6-year-old grandson, Gael, sat in their car, waiting for the school bus to arrive on California Highway 94.
Outside, in air that was already balmy despite the early hour, traffic whizzed by, peppered with the occasional white-and-green decal of a Customs and Border Protection vehicle. Grandmother and grandson sat, chatting, as they waited for the school bus to arrive. Then a young woman tapped on the car window, startling them. Dukes remembers clearly what happened next.  
Lowering the window cautiously, she saw the woman was with four dusty and travel-worn young men.  
Using stilted English, punctuated with hand gestures, the woman asked if she could use Dukes’ cell phone. Dukes doesn’t know what language the woman spoke to her companions, but it wasn’t English, which Dukes speaks pretty well, and it certainly wasn’t Spanish, which she speaks fluently. 
Dukes, who has lived near the border for more than a decade, immediately recognized the group as recently arrived migrants. She thought they might be from Haiti or Africa given their dark skin. The woman outside the car asked which way they should head to find a town. 
The conversation was respectful and polite, Dukes said. The migrants seemed tired, hungry and a little confused. “They were clearly just looking for somewhere to sit down and rest — for some help,” Dukes said.
Dukes refused to hand over her phone, but directed them, as best she could, toward the tiny hamlet of Dulzura, some six miles west. Then came a pivotal moment: Dukes warned the migrants to be careful on the busy road.
 “It can be dangerous for you,” she said. “Watch out for the buses.”
At that word: “bus,” the young woman’s eyes lit up. 
“Bus,” she urged her companions, who repeated the word to each other with hopeful recognition. And at that very instant, Gael’s yellow school bus appeared, coasting to a stop at the side of the highway in front of an abandoned sofa and a battered street sign. 
Seeing the bus, the young woman raised a whistle to her lips and blew, sending a shriek across the steady hum of traffic. Suddenly, more migrants appeared from the bushes. Ten. A dozen. Eventually at least 15 more people approached, Dukes estimated. The grandmother ushered Gael towards the waiting bus, while attempting to explain to the group of migrants:
“No, this isn’t a public bus,” she recalled saying. “This is a school bus. It’s not for you!”
Hearing this news, the group stopped advancing, Dukes told USA TODAY in a recent interview at the same remote roadside bus stop. Nobody from the group approached the school bus, she said. Nobody spoke, or attempted to speak to the driver or to the children on the bus. The group never got close to the vehicle, and they certainly never attempted to board. 
The bus drove away, with Gael on board. 
The migrants melted back into the bushes. 
Dukes got back in her car and drove the short distance home.
In real-life, the short interaction was over. But on the internet, it would soon take on a life of its own. 
In interviews, officials from the local school district, local government and law enforcement, parents, local journalists and others helped piece together the original story, and what happened to it online. 
The story of Dulzura started with a kernel of truth. But – much like other stories that have marked this election season – it included a mixture of immigration and possible danger, released into a country already wound tight over issues of border security. 
Soon after the bus pulled away from the roadside, versions of the story cartwheeled through cyberspace, driven onward by a chain of influencers whose claims moved farther and farther away from the truth.  
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Liz Bystedt first heard about what happened from the district’s maintenance and transportation director, who had learned about it from the driver of Gael’s school bus.
Sitting in the small conference room of the Jamul-Dulzura Union School district’s headquarters, Bystedt, who has served as superintendent since 2018, laid out the story.
The driver, who declined an interview request from USA TODAY, had called her superior, who immediately called Bystedt in what she described as a “heightened” state.
“I could hear the bus driver in the background, and she was very upset,” Bystedt said. “Basically, the words were that a group of migrants tried to get on the school bus, OK, and so I didn’t have a lot of information at that point.”
Bystedt knew that worries about the situation could escalate. She sat down almost immediately and composed an email to parents, wording the message carefully, and noting the district was investigating the incident. 
“If I am given any information to share with you, I will,” Bystedt wrote. “In the meantime, please be informed that for the safety of students and bus drivers, if there is a group of migrants at a bus stop, we will drive right by to the next stop.”
At 10:18 a.m., just minutes after Bystedt’s email went out, San Diego freelance journalist Amy Reichert posted a screenshot of the message to her almost 10,000 followers on X with the siren emoji and a message: “URGENT.”
Aside from the red-light emoji, Reichert’s X post simply restated what Bystedt had written. “I’m the one that broke this story — but I broke the story solely based upon the information the school district told me, period,”  Reichert told USA TODAY. 
The post was a modest success, with more than 400 re-posts and 646 likes. But it was the first puff of wind in a storm.
At USA TODAY’s request, research agency Advance Democracy, Inc., analyzed social media posts related to the incident. The group scoured mainstream and fringe platforms for mentions of the encounter. 
The first example of someone claiming the migrants tried to force their way onto the school bus came in the replies to the freelance journalist’s post. X user ScribeMoon (2,800 followers) responded: 
“We have migrants from all countries here in SoCal, including many from radical Islamic countries and China. The migrants are trying to force their way onto school buses in San Diego.”
At 5:54 p.m. California time, not 12 hours after the migrants had asked Dukes to use her cell phone, far-right MAGA influencer George Behizy added his own post. 
On X, Behizy used his handle @Behizytweets to relay a startlingly inaccurate message to his more than 380,000 followers:
“BREAKING: A group of illegal migrants in San Diego County, California tried to hijack TWO school buses full of Elementary & Middle school kids from the Jamul-Dulzura Union District on Highway 94
Border Czar Kamala is RESPONSIBLE.”
The post, which embedded a local news story with facts far less dire than what Behizy described, was the first example ADI could find of the word “hijack” being used to describe the case. And that post went viral, earning more than 13,000 reposts and more than 22,000 likes.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Behizy acknowledged he didn’t do any additional research before making his post, other than reading Bystedt’s statement. He said his post accurately reflects what the superintendent wrote:
“A group of dudes — like, adults — tried to enter into a school bus that were not students,” He said. “Are you going to read that and go, ‘Let me call and understand more context?’ Because when I read that, I go, ‘That’s bad, that’s very bad.” 
Behizy’s post was quickly picked up by other far-right accounts including @EndWokeness and @LibsOfTikTok, which repeated the false hijacking claim to their millions of followers. 
From there, it was a quick jump to the owner of X himself: Elon Musk. At 10:43 a.m. on Aug. 29, the morning after the incident, Musk reposted an @EndWokeness post claiming to his almost 200 million followers that there had been a hijacking by “illegal aliens.” “When is enough enough?” he asked. 
Back in Jamul, Superintendent Bystedt was appalled. 
Her short email, meant to reassure parents and deescalate a tense situation, had instead lit a wildfire of disinformation. 
By the time Bystedt’s husband’s best friend — who lives in Boston — called the house on Thursday saying he had just seen her ill-fated letter on the national news, the superintendent had already switched into self-defense mode.
“For my own mental health, I actually walked in the house on Wednesday night and told my husband, ‘Do not turn on the news any time I am in the room,’” she said. “I said: ‘Something happened, but it’s not what’s being portrayed, and all that is going to do is make me mad and eat me up — I’m just going to get mad at people.” 
Bystedt said what frustrates her so much about what happened isn’t just that people have taken an innocuous incident and spun it into something completely different. It’s that she and her staff now have to deal with the consequences of that idle and exploitative activity online.
“It was devastating, because I knew the fallout was coming,” Bystedt said. “I knew that I didn’t put anything out that was incorrect. But I also knew someone had taken that information and just twisted it for their own political agenda.”
People spread lies online because it, quite literally, makes them feel good.
Gizem Ceylan, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale School of Management, studies the pleasure feedback loop that comes from sharing information online. The basic premise is simple: When people engage with the content one posts online, it releases chemicals in one’s brain that soon wear off. An easy way to replace those chemicals and repeat the feedback loop is to keep on posting.
In recent years, a network of “influencers,” minor celebrities and part-time grifters has grown that essentially feeds off the spreading of political disinformation. For members of that network, whether they have 19 followers or 190 million, the basic premise that encourages them to keep posting is the same, Ceylan said.
“You share something and people start liking it and retweeting it, and that gives you social pleasure,” she said. “But the next time, you take the prototypicality of the information you posted before, but maybe you add a little more flavor, a little more flashiness.”
Erik Bucy, a professor of strategic communication at the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech, said members of the cottage industry feeding disinformation online are also seeking to belong in a social in-crowd. 
“There’s actual recognition, at least among people in your tribe or community or network,” Bucy said. “The dopamine and serotonin hit is very short-lived, but the community formation is longer lived.”
Before they even really know it, social media users aren’t just sharing content, they’re changing it — evolving it — producing it themselves. The content didn’t start out as a lie, but by degrees of imagination, exaggeration and hyperbole, it no longer resembles the real-life instance that sparked the conversation.
On social media, Ceylan describes this as like a micro game of Telephone going on inside the bigger macro game. Not only is content changing and evolving as it moves from one user to another, but each user is also changing their internal narrative about what happened.
“This is basic instrumental learning that we know from animal behavior right?” she said. “Animals want to get this food and so they pull a lever in order to get the food. Every time they pull a lever, they get food, and, over time, they learn to pull the lever more strongly to get more food.” 
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In the days after the incident, under pressure from parents and with a spotlight on this remote, dusty corner of California, the Route B school bus made its way flanked by vehicles from various government agencies. The local sheriff sent cars. A couple of YouTubers even showed up, saying they were just there to document what happened.
“We were quite a parade,” Bystedt said. 
Of the potentially millions of people who learned some version of the story of the Dulzura school bus, nobody knows that story better than Dukes.
Waiting at the side of that same road, a couple of weeks later, Dukes contemplated a question about her interaction with the group of migrants: was she, herself, scared?
Dukes was baffled by the show. The people who she spoke with that morning were simply tired and hungry, she said. There were a lot of them, and it was a confusing scene, but she never sensed any malice.
But was she scared?
“Yes,” she said. At the time, briefly, she was scared. 
Dukes said she has seen migrants working their way through the valleys around her home for decades. She knows the restaurants and stores they frequent. She sees them out of her car window, early in the morning. The migrants are as much a part of the landscape as the dry eucalyptus trees and the shadows of the mountains.
But for a few moments, faced suddenly with a large group of strangers who might be aggressive, who might be criminals or just desperate, Dukes said she felt real fear.
But then she talked to them. 
She understood what they wanted. When the migrants heard the word “bus,” she said, they showed hope. 
For Dukes, that fear evaporated as quickly as sweat in the dry California heat. 
It was just a brief encounter at the side of the road.