Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has claimed that New York City Mayor Eric Adams “could not last a week in Texas” in handling the illegal immigration crisis.
During a town hall event in New York’s Upper West Side on Sept. 6, Mr. Adams said the influx of illegal immigrants “will destroy New York City,” saying New York had received more than 110,000 immigrants in the past year.
The mayor criticized the Texas governor for bussing illegal immigrants to his city, lamenting that New York City was “getting no support on this national crisis.”
“I thought about Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York’ when he sang ‘If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.’ Well, the mayor may have made it to be mayor of New York, but he could not last a week in Texas,” Mr. Abbott said.
The governor added, “They have so few migrants in New York compared to what we deal with every single day.”
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sept. 5, Mr. Abbott revealed that Texas had bussed “over 35,000 migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities,” including over 13,300 to New York City and over 11,300 to the nation’s capital. The bussing program has provided “critical relief to overwhelmed Texas border towns,” the governor added.
“What’s maddening is the fact that in New York and Chicago, in D.C. and LA, and other places, they put out policies self-proclaiming that they’re sanctuary cities, and they love to promote these liberal ideologies until they have to actually live up and apply them,” Mr. Abbott said. “It’s clear that the policies of sanctuary cities and letting everybody live for free simply do not work.”
Crisis
This is not the first time that Mr. Adams has criticized Mr. Abbott, ever since Texas bussed its first group of illegal immigrants to Midtown’s Port Authority Bus Terminal on Aug. 5, 2022. In an X post on Aug. 7, the mayor alleged the governor was using “innocent people as political pawns to manufacture a crisis.”“New Yorkers are stepping up to fix it—that’s our city’s values,” Mr. Adams added. “But we need the federal government’s help—money, technical assistance and more.”
Last week, Mr. Abbott promised that he would send “even more buses” to the nation’s capital, if the Biden administration decided to move forward with a reported plan to keep illegal immigrants in Texas using GPS monitoring devices to track their whereabouts.
“Biden considers forcing migrant families to remain in Texas. This scam was tried years ago & was shot down by a judge. We will send Biden the same swift justice,” Mr. Abbott wrote on X. “And, we will add even more buses of migrants to Washington D.C.”
Mr. Abbott reiterated his stance about the GPS devices during the Fox interview.
“You got to hand it to [President] Joe [Biden], he got the direction right, but the mileage wrong,” the governor said. “The policy should be one mile further all the way across the Rio Grande; it should be remain in Mexico, not remain in Texas.”
“That policy has been tried in the past and was legally stricken down,” he added.
Immigration
There were 132,652 arrests by U.S. Border Patrol for illegally crossing the U.S. border from Mexico in July, up 33 percent from a month earlier, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Meanwhile, 59 percent of respondents said they were in favor of making it easier for illegal immigrants in New York to get work authorizations, while 33 percent opposed it.
“Over 40% of all New Yorkers believe that immigrants take more than they offer society. About a third believe current migrants are dangerous, perhaps even criminal, only want hand-outs and are a source of illegal drugs. But in each of these cases more New Yorkers disagree with, rather than hold, these judgments,” said SCRI Director Don Levy in a statement accompanying the poll.
The poll also found that 50 percent opposed a border wall spanning the entire U.S.–Mexico border, while 41 percent were in favor of it.
The poll was conducted from Sept. 5 to 8, surveying 414 New York adults via phone and 386 responses from a proprietary online panel of New Yorkers.
