Shortly after Governor Greg Abbott announced in April that he would bus asylum-seekers from Texas to Washington, D.C. in what critics called a knee-jerk stunt to pump poll numbers against challenger Beto O’Rourke ahead of the upcoming election, Texas state Representative Gene Wu of Houston mocked the governor in a Tweet: “This was a well thought-out [sic] plan with no easily foreseeable unintended consequences.”
In late July, after authorizing law enforcement to return migrants to ports of entry, Abbott began sending refugees to New York City. (If shipping migrants to the nation’s capital was a volley in a federal-state showdown, extending the campaign to a liberal city with no connection to national immigration enforcement was a mere “screw you,” an attention-grabbing ploy.)
“We’ve got to secure our border because the Biden administration is not securing it,” Abbott said over the weekend, doubling down on the strategy. “The reason why we began putting people on buses in the first place is because the Biden administration [was] dumping migrants off in small little towns of 10 or 25,000 people, and they were completely overwhelmed.”
