How Texas Gov. Greg Abbott divided Democrats on immigration with migrant busing

CHICAGO – Texas Governor Greg Abbott knows he is wreaking havoc by sending busloads of migrants from his border towns to sanctuary cities.

The signs are obvious.

New York says it is at a critical point. Chicago is running out of time and space before a harsh winter hits. Washington, DC says its housing is at capacity. Other cities, like Denver, They have declared states of emergency.

But if Abbott has made one thing clear, it’s this: He won’t stop.

For more than a year, Abbott has regularly sent busloads of immigrants to cities that have been considered sanctuaries for immigrants. It’s a controversial practice, as officials on the receiving end say bus transportation arrives without warning or coordination and with the intent to create chaos. Since April 2022, the Abbott administration has bussed some 75,500 migrants from Texas to six citiesaccording to the governor’s office.

Abbott has said everything started out of sheer desperation while overseeing small border towns filled with migrants. That’s something he attributes to President Joe Biden’s border policies, which he says are lax.

Along the way, however, a different phenomenon has taken hold: Democrats are raising the alarm about immigration, and leaders in sanctuary cities and blue states thousands of miles from the southern border now warn that their situation is terrible. Democrats are calling on the White House for more funding and to take control of domestic operations to ensure that migrants are sent to areas that have the capacity to take them.

All of this has added up to a shift in the immigration debate, where Democrats are calling on the president of their own party to do more to contain what they call a crisis. And this winter could make things worse.

When asked if bus transportation would continue during the winter months in cold-weather places like Chicago and New York, Abbott spokeswoman Renae Eze said in a statement to NBC News: “Until President Biden makes his work and secure the border, Texas will continue busing migrants. to sanctuary cities to provide much-needed relief to our overwhelmed border cities.”

Abbott says he’s not alone; other organizations that receive federal funds, including Catholic Charities, sends migrants on buses and planes to places like Chicago and New York. Eze, the spokesman, said Texas can’t be blamed for the bulk of migrants sent to sanctuary cities, saying the number of immigrants Those sent by the State only represent a fraction of the immigrants who arrive in those cities.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has already warned that the migrant crisis could “destroy New York City.” The administration of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is at war with his fellow Democrats —both at city hall and at the state level—about where to house immigrants during the winter. And in phone calls and even while on Air Force One with the president, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Biden ally, has repeatedly implored him to take action on border issues, according to the governor’s office, particularly with funding federal, because he says his state is overwhelmed and running out of resources.

From Abbott’s point of view, it’s a change that should have been made a long time ago.

“Before we started busing illegal immigrants to New York, it was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all the chaos and all the problems that come with it,” Abbott said in an interview with ABC News “Night Line” A year ago. “Now the rest of America is understanding exactly what’s going on.”

In some parts of Texas, Abbott has strong support.

“He’s doing the entire country a good service,” said George Seay, a Dallas-based co-founder of Annandale Capital and a friend and supporter of Abbott. “My first impression was, ‘I don’t really understand where this is going and I’m not sure how substantial it is.’ And I look back and think it’s a stroke of genius on his part. He woke up a lot of people.”

“This is not a political issue,” Seay continued, saying Abbott’s actions were akin to throwing a bucket of ice water on officials in northern states. “It is a non-partisan, non-ideological national crisis that must be better managed.”

Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas-based Republican strategist who also serves in the Texas State Guard, was one of the first to carry out an order from the governor to deploy groups of migrants on buses, he said. Steinhauser noted that if a city as large as Chicago was feeling the impact of migrants sent in by the hundreds, imagine the impact on small border towns that regularly welcome thousands of migrants.

“What you see with these numbers is that some of the pushback is coming from communities that feel like they are now competing for resources, competing for services with those people,” Steinhauser said of northern states struggling with the influx of immigrants. “Now it’s hitting the Democratic Party in a Democratic-run city and creating a rift within the Democratic Party.”

In fact, it is creating a gap. Not only have there been clashes between local Democratic leaders calling on Biden to do more, but competition over resources is an explosive issue in Chicago, where Black and Latino communities have been at odds over the location of migrant camps.

The frost begins

As winter hits Chicago, Democrats in the city They disagree with their state counterparts about the last site for an urgently needed migrant camp before the worst of the season hits. The city began preparing a site to house the thousands of migrants arriving mostly from Texas, only to have the state raise environmental concerns it says it warned about.

“While the city may be comfortable placing asylum seekers in a site where toxins are present without a full understanding of whether it is safe, the state is not,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office said in a statement this week. “This site will not advance as a shelter with State participation.”

The revolt that followed later led several councilors to ask for resignations from a list of city officials.

The governor’s office has called on the Biden administration to do more to limit Abbott’s ability to control where migrants are sent, suggesting he could activate the Office of Refugee Resettlement to transport migrants.

Not only are Democrats at war with each other, but there are signs the party is losing the public’s faith in whether it can handle the issue better than Republicans. An NBC poll in September showed that 50% of registered voters surveyed said the Republican Party was better at addressing border security, compared to 20% of voters who chose Democrats. And 18% more registered voters in that poll chose Republicans over Democrats when asked who they thought was better at dealing with immigration overall.

But even when clashes occur within the party, Democrats point the finger south, directly at Abbott. When asked about Seay’s comment that Abbott’s busing operation was a “stroke of genius,” Pritzker’s chief of staff scoffed.

“I don’t think it’s a stroke of genius, I think it’s a stroke of cruelty,” Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s chief of staff, said in an interview. “I would have a lot more sympathy for Greg Abbott if he approached this in a way like, ‘We’re running out of capacity in Texas and we’re unable to handle this, so we need help.’ And so we’re going to coordinate… as opposed to jockeying, not being willing to coordinate, not being willing to talk, not being able to try to help accommodate these people in a way that makes sense.”

Caprara said Texas has had no communication with Illinois at any level. In the middle, he said, are immigrants who fled desperate situations in their home countries. He referred to episodes in which buses dropped off migrants in the middle of the night. In a case, a child died en route to Illinois from Texas as part of Abbott’s bus transportation program, he said.

“I never knew about his chief of staff, I never knew about the director of an agency. The governor himself never picked up the phone and called my boss,” Caprara said. “In fact, in many cases it appears that they direct buses to drop-off points to places where there will be the maximum amount of chaos.”

The White House too has reprimanded Abbott’s practices, citing one of Abbott’s bus deployments, left families outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence orn Christmas Eve last year.

Why Abbott says he does

Abbott’s reasoning for busing, a review of his public comments over the past year shows, is that the Biden administration is failing to enforce immigration laws already in place. With record numbers of migrants crossing the border and seeking asylum, systems are overwhelmed in Texas. Abbott has groups of migrants deployed after the Border Patrol processes them to places where he says there is more space. He has chosen sanctuary cities because they are supposed to welcome immigrants, he says, and insists that no newcomer to the country is forced to board a bus; He is only sent to those who raise their hands to travel to other cities.

But Dylan Corbett, executive director of the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute, called the question of whether immigrants voluntarily accepted transportation to specific cities a “very gray and murky area.”

“Are people being forced against their will? I don’t have any information to suggest that’s the case,” Corbett said. “People are always told with their eyes wide open, clearly, ‘This is what’s happening, where are you going, this is how far it’s going to take?’ ‘ No, that doesn’t happen either.”

Regarding the lack of coordination, Abbott has responded that he is doing what was done to him, without warning or adequate assistance from the federal government.

John Wittman, a former communications official who previously worked in the Abbott administration, said the governor has helped change the conversation about immigration in the country, with places like New York, Chicago and Boston talking about the border.

“There’s no question that the bus transportation strategy is having an impact,” Wittman said. “All of a sudden, there seems to be some real bipartisan support for securing the border, which, before this busing strategy that the governor put in place, I don’t think anyone saw coming.

“Who would have thought that Eric Adams would ask the Biden administration to do something about the border?”

Now, Abbott maintains that Chicago, New York and other big cities see the emergency for what it is.

“This is something that is unsustainable. Those are the words of your mayor.” Abbott he told a New York City crowd at the Manhattan Institute in September. “Those are the words of the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles. Those are the words of the governor of Texas.”