On Monday’s broadcast of NBC’s “MTP Now,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño stated that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott busing migrants from Laredo to Democratic-run cities does provide some help and that while recent policy changes by the Biden administration have helped, “we should have done this a long time ago, proactively.”

Treviño said, “[O]f course, there’s no doubt that we’re seeing historic challenges that we’ve never seen before at our southern borders. But, before the end of Title 42, our local hospitals and NGOs were already near capacity or at capacity. But everything we’ve been doing here since the declaration of emergency locally has held up and we have not been overwhelmed to this point.”

Later, host Garrett Haake asked, “You talk about the idea that this is America’s problem to solve. And one of the ways that your Governor has been bringing it to the attention of the rest of the country has been this idea of busing migrants to Democratic-run cities, including migrants from Laredo. Do you think that’s helpful in any way, or does it politicize the crisis? What’s your view of the way the Governor’s been handling this?”

Treviño responded, “Well, these are situations that they do a lot of things to put a band-aid on things. It helps a little bit. But we have to understand that the smugglers are the ones in control who are passing the migrants. So, that’s a situation we have to be cognizant of. Any little bit helps. But I think this immigration reform should have been done a long time ago. And this is the evidence of what happens [that] no reform was done in many years before, many decades.”

Haake then asked, “What do you make of the changes that the Biden administration’s put in place just within the last week or so…some of the ideas about changing enforcement further south and changing the ways that the CBP moves people around, are these changes that could have been helpful earlier? Do you think they can hold if the numbers pick up again some time in the near future?”

Treviño answered, “Well, these things that they have done do help, but like I said, these are things acting reactively, we should have done this a long time ago, proactively. But, yeah, that definitely, that might be contributing to the decrease in the migrants we’re seeing.”

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