Abbott is Playing Hardball by Marc A. Thiessen

In Texas, Abbott is Playing Hardball on Illegal Border Crossings. Good.

By Marc A. Thiessen

In 2019, as he prepared to launch his campaign for mayor of New York, Eric Adams slammed President Donald Trump’s policies at the southern border, tweeting that “New York City will ALWAYS stand up to” Trump and promising: “To anyone in the world fleeing hatred and oppression, the ultimate city of immigrants wants you to remember: you’re ALWAYS welcome here.”

Well, apparently not “ALWAYS.” Now that the Texas Division of Emergency Management has begun transporting to New York City asylum seekers and illegal migrants released from federal custody, Adams is crying foul – calling “horrific” the decision by Gov. Greg Abbott, R, to send about 800 people who had illegally crossed the border and complaining that even before Abbott’s buses arrived New York was already “overburdened” by an “unprecedented surge” of asylum seekers.

Give me a break. According to Bill Melugin, the Fox News reporter who has been on the ground in Eagle Pass, Texas, covering the border crisis for more than a year, the Del Rio sector – a 47-county region – reported 2,200 migrants had arrived illegally in a single 24-hour period this week. In all, Melugin tells me, there have been 401,449 illegal crossings in the Del Rio sector since fiscal 2022 began on Oct. 1 – double the number from the same period a year before. To put those numbers in perspective, consider: Eagle Pass has a population of about 29,000 people. Yet Adams is complaining that Texas is sending 800 migrants to New York – a city of more than 8 million people?

Adams didn’t protest in October when the Biden administration sent planeloads of migrants, some of them underage, from Texas to the New York area. But when Abbott sent a charter bus to New York City this month carrying 54 migrants, Adams called it “irresponsible,” “un-American” and “inhumane.”

Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but you don’t get to announce that “New York City will remain a sanctuary city under an Adams administration” – and then complain that too many migrants are using your sanctuary. The same goes for Washington, D.C. In 2016, after Trump was elected, Mayor Muriel Bowser reaffirmed “DC’s status as a sanctuary city” and promised to welcome all residents “no matter their immigration status.” But now that Abbott has sent about 6,900 migrants to the nation’s capital, she says D.C. is at a “tipping point” and has asked for National Guard assistance to help manage intake (a request the Biden administration recently denied).

All Abbott is doing is taking the mayors up on their offer to provide sanctuary. “In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Abbott said Aug. 5. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.”

Abbott invited Adams and Bowser to visit the southern border to see the crisis firsthand – an invitation neither has accepted.

What Abbott is doing is brilliant. One of the biggest problems in politics today is that elites in places such as Washington and New York are insulated from the calamitous effects that their actions impose on the rest of our country. Abbott is simply giving them a taste of the disaster the Biden administration has unleashed on his state. On taking office, President Joe Biden suspended the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are considered. He also terminated the “safe third country” agreements that Trump negotiated with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which required migrants to apply for asylum in the first safe foreign country they crossed into.

Biden effectively hung a big welcome sign on our southern border – and people illegally crossed in record numbers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from July shows more than 199,900 encounters at the southern border. We are on pace to surpass 2 million encounters this fiscal year – more than CPB has recorded for any fiscal year since 1960. That does not count the “gotaways” who were not apprehended when they attempted to cross into our country. And despite record-high border crossings, deportations under Biden dropped in 2021 to the lowest levels in Immigration and Customs Enforcement history – which means that under Biden, record numbers of asylum seekers and illegal migrants are being released into our communities. More than 1 million people who arrived illegally and have been given deportation orders still have not left – while countless others have simply disappeared.

Instead of complaining that Abbott is sending migrants into their cities, Adams and Bowser should be complaining that Biden is failing to stem the flow of illegal migrants into our country. With his buses, Abbott is sending a message: Texas isn’t going to bear this burden alone. If the mayors of New York and Washington want to virtue-signal on immigration and border crossings by declaring themselves sanctuary cities, then Texas will help them live up to their promises.