Texas Governor Greg Abbott bused more than 11,000 migrants to the sanctuary cities of New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. since the project began in April. During that same period, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 440,000 migrants in the five Texas-based border sectors.
In mid-April, the first bus of migrants completed their trip from the Del Rio Sector in Texas to Washington, D.C., Breitbart Texas reported. Approximately 50 volunteered to make the journey on the air-conditioned buses provided at no cost.
Since that time, Governor Abbott’s team utilized 255 buses to transport more than 11,375 migrants from Texas to the sanctuary cities, according to information provided by the Office of the Texas Governor.
Federal officials and the mayors of the three sanctuary cities immediately condemned Abbott’s busing plan as racist, horrific, and unpatriotic.
CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus called out Abbott for not coordinating the arrivals with local officials.
“Governor Abbott is taking actions to move migrants without adequately coordinating with the federal government and local border communities,” Commissioner Magnus said in a written statement in April. “CBP has always worked closely with and supported border communities in Texas, many of which CBP personnel call home.”
However, Abbott’s busing of migrants followed more than a year of federal officials flying and busing migrants to cities in Texas and across the nation under cover of darkness.
After the first bus from Texas arrived in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams called the transportation of migrants on the buses “horrific.”
“This is horrific, when you think about what the governor is doing,” Adams said. “It is unimaginable what the governor of Texas has done, when you think about this country, a country that has always been open to those who were fleeing persecution.”
During an interview on Fox News, Abbott explained why Texas is busing the migrants to other cities across the nation.
“Most of America has not really understood the magnitude of the problem that we have on the border until we started sending these buses up to New York,” the governor stated. “Remember, this is not a Texas problem. This is an American problem caused by the President of the United States of America. And so many people have been blind to this until suddenly buses of migrants started showing up in their city, which is a sanctuary city, by the way.”
When the first bus of migrants arrived in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot accused Abbott of “manufacturing” a crisis. “He is manufacturing a human crisis, and it makes no sense to me,” Mayor Lightfoot said in a statement broadcast by ABC7 in Chicago. “It’s decidedly unpatriotic and un-American. I understand the pressures that the people of Texas and some of the other border states are under. We see that on a daily basis. But the thing to do is not this.”
He professes to be a Christian,” Lightfoot said of Gov. Abbott. “This is not the Christianity and the teachings of the Bible that I know.”
Renae Eze responded to this, saying, “Attacking the Governor’s commitment to his faith is a pathetic political ploy to change the conversation away from Mayor Lightfoot’s unwillingness to uphold her city’s self-declared sanctuary status.”
“President Biden’s inaction at our southern border continues putting the lives of Texans—and Americans—at risk and is overwhelming our communities,” Governor Abbott said in a written statement as the first bus of migrants departed to Chicago. “To continue providing much-needed relief to our small, overrun border towns, Chicago will join fellow sanctuary cities Washington, D.C. and New York City as an additional drop-off location.”
However, when Democrat city officials in El Paso decided to follow Governor Abbott’s lead and bus migrants released in their border city to New York City, Mayor Adams expressed no derogatory comments. The City has chartered 25 buses since August 23 and transported 1,135 to New York City.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas jumped on the bandwagon of criticizing Abbott’s busing program and said the program puts “financial pressure” on his department.
“It also puts financial pressure on us, in that we fund the non-profit organizations. We understand their capacity. We understand their needs, and when that action is not coordinated with us, and with them, the whole system is out of whack.”
His comments ignore the financial impact on Texas border communities. In Eagle Pass, the pressure on a local funeral home became so overwhelming, the director was forced to stop accepting the bodies of dead migrants. The director said the cancellation of the policy of accepting deceased migrants became effective on August 18.
The frustration of Texas border city officials toward the Biden administration is not new. Just over a year ago, Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano, a Democrat, was forced to declare a state of disaster as more than 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants flooded across the Rio Grande.
“Dire circumstances require dire responses,” the mayor stated. “There’s people having babies down there [under the bridge], there’s people collapsing out of the heat. They’re pretty aggressive, rightly so — they’ve been in the heat day after day after day.”
While the mayors of New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. continue to complain about the mere 11,000 migrants bused to their cities, the people of Texas have long endured the weight of dealing with the Biden border crisis that allowed more than 1.26 million migrants to enter the five Texas-based border sectors during the current fiscal year.
Last Friday, Governor Abbott again defended his decision to bring the border to Biden. During an interview with America’s Newsroom on Fox News, the governor said:
Listen, in part in Texas, we are doing it to relieve the burned local communities are facing along the border. We have small communities of about 25,000 people who have thousands of illegal immigrants dumped into their community. So they were begging for relief. that is why we began this busing operation to Washington D.C. Plus, we have a president who has refused to go see the chaos he has created on the border and a border czar in Kamala Harris who has refused to see what’s going on at the border. If they won’t go to the border, we’re taking the border to them. So they can see the challenges they are posing to the entire United States of America.
“This year, more than 2 million people will cross the border illegally,” Abbott added. “They need to deal with the consequences as well as the result of what the United Nations says, and that is U.S.-Mexico border is the deadliest land crossing in the world.”
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