In an attempt to shift responsibility for border crossers on his Democratic political rivals, Texas Governor Greg Abbott bused a group of 80 to 100 recently arrived migrants to Chicago on Wednesday.
According to Fox News, the buses arrived at Chicago’s Union Station at roughly 7:30 p.m.
About 20 to 30 of the 100 or so passengers on the buses were young children. Children and pregnant ladies were in the busload. The refugees claimed to be from Venezuela.
According to state statistics acquired via a Freedom of Information Act request, Texas has bused more than 7,000 migrants to Washington, D.C., and New York City since April, spending close to $13 million on the project through August 8.
Wynne Transportation, the charter company that transports migrants to the different destinations, has received $12,707,720.92 from Texas.
Since April, more than 7,400 migrants have been transported by bus to Washington, DC, and since August 5, more than 1,500 to New York City.
The necessity for the buses, according to Republican presidential candidate Greg Abbott, who is running for re-election in November, is due to Democratic President Joe Biden’s failure to secure the border with Mexico.
Between October 1, 2021, and July 31, 2022, the U.S. Border Patrol detained 1.8 million migrants along the southwest border, setting a new record.
Democrat Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, was criticised by Abbott on Wednesday night for her city’s “sanctuary” statute, which restricts cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
The first thing Abbott said was that “President Biden’s inactivity at our southern border continues to put the lives of Texans—and Americans—in danger and is overwhelming our communities.”
Chicago will join other sanctuary cities…as an additional drop off location…to continue to bring much-needed assistance to our tiny, overwhelmed border communities,’ Abbott said in a statement.
Abbott issued a statement saying, “Mayor Lightfoot likes to emphasise the obligation of her city to welcome everybody regardless of legal status.” I’m eager to see this obligation put into practise as these migrants get support from a sanctuary city that has the ability to help them.
Although it is unclear what alternative choices have been presented to the migrants, Abbott’s administration has said that migrants are only taken outside of the state with their written consent.
Lightfoot replied to Abbott’s statement and stated on Twitter that around fifty refugees had been moved from Texas to Chicago.
“We recognise that many are escaping dangerous, violent, or unstable settings. While these people negotiate the next stages of their trip and our community partners have been working tirelessly to offer a safety net, we will react with vital services.
The city is doing all possible to provide housing, food, and most importantly protection, for these immigrants and their families. This is not new; Chicago welcomes hundreds of migrants each year and offers critical support, according to the statement.
Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas, sadly lacks both empathy and shame. However, since since he instituted these discriminatory expulsion measures, we have been working with our neighbourhood partners to get the city ready to welcome these people.
The Democratic mayors of Washington and New York City have pleaded for federal aid ever since Abbott launched the busing initiative.
Additionally, it sparked a verbal exchange between Abbott and Mayor of New York City Eric Adams.
Abbott has been charged with installing security on the buses to prevent immigrants from alighting before arriving at their destination, according to Manuel Castro, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in the Big Apple.
Abbott has disputed these assertions.
“Mayor Adams is outright lying and has no knowledge of the busing system in Texas.” As long as they have been vetted and released by the federal government, migrants are permitted to disembark at any of the points on the route to New York City or Washington, D.C., according to Abbott’s press secretary Renae Eze, who spoke to the New York Post.
New immigrants to the nation’s capital have had difficulty locating long-term housing and medical treatment.
The White House has claimed that Abbott’s initiatives and a related campaign by another Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, are causing instability and utilising migrants as players in political games.
But El Paso, Texas, which is governed by Democrats, also dispatched a busload of migrants to New York City last week, and it apparently intended to send another busload to Chicago.
Immigration watchdogs estimate that since President Joe Biden took office last year, approximately 4.9 million undocumented immigrants have entered the country; they have designated New York and Los Angeles as the nation’s most dangerous sanctuary cities.
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), 3.4 million migrants have crossed the southwest border since Biden’s inauguration, and an additional 900,000 have entered the country covertly.
The startling figure fuels growing concerns that the Biden administration is dozing off as record numbers of people—along with those suspected of trafficking in drugs and carrying out terrorist attacks—cross the southern border, leading the majority of Americans to believe that this amount to a “invasion.”
According to Dan Stein, president of FAIR, the almost 5 million people who have entered the country illegally since January 20, 2021, are equivalent to the “entire population of Ireland.” He said that the government had “sabotaged our country’s immigration laws.” Democrats are on the defensive as a result of drone camera video showing migrants, the majority of whom are from Mexico and Central America, downplaying the role that Biden’s policies had in the record-breaking migration rates.
For the first time in American history, the migrant encounter tracker maintained by Customs and Border Protection for the fiscal year has exceeded 2 million.
53 percent of respondents to an Ipsos study believed that human crossings along the border constituted to a “invasion.”
Even migrants seen attempting to cross the border in camouflage outfits have been apprehended in recent weeks, and southern Republican-led governments are making a show of busing immigrants to Democrat-led northern towns.
Republicans claim that Biden doesn’t take the immigration situation seriously and is not working hard enough to solve the humanitarian concerns affecting border towns since he has not been to the southern border since assuming office last year.
The government said last month that the border wall between the United States and Mexico may now be completed in Yuma, Arizona. Although Biden promised to halt wall building during the campaign, the government eventually consented to certain obstacles, claiming safety.