By Jennie Taer, Alex Oliveira and Carl Campanile | New York Post
AUSTIN — Gov. Greg Abbott wasn’t going to bus migrants to New York City. And then Eric Adams opened his big mouth.
That’s how the three-term Republican describes his 2022 decision to send 119,000 migrants from the Texas border to sanctuary cities across the country — including more than 45,000 to New York alone.
In an exclusive interview with The Post, Abbott explained that at first he was only sending migrant buses to Washington, DC, to make a point about the Biden-Harris administration’s failure to crack down on the massive surge of illegal crossings — and relieve some pressure on the border towns that were being overwhelmed.
Then, “out of nowhere,” Abbott said, “Mayor Adams started criticizing me for busing them to New York, which I was not doing. But he kept criticizing me.”
“I thought, ‘You know what? New York is a sanctuary city, if I’m going to get the criticism, I’m going to get the credit.’ So we started busing them to New York.”
The first buses sent by Abbott arrived at Port Authority Bus Terminal a few weeks later in early August.
Abbott then started sending buses not just to New York, but to major sanctuary cities across the US, from Los Angeles to Chicago and Denver.
‘A United States issue’
The result was a program that may have changed the course of politics, helping to turn the influx of millions of migrants from a border-state problem into a national issue that has impacted large portions of the US — and making immigration and border policy one of the biggest issues in the 2024 election.
Migrants from the border were already arriving to New York City by the summer of 2022 — though Abbott said Texas wasn’t involved in sending them.
In July, Adams claimed migrants coming to NYC were “arriving on buses sent by the Texas and Arizona governments,” which both Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey vehemently denied at the time.
A City Hall source said NYC officials believed that many migrants were coming to New York after being bused to Washington as part of Abbott’s program.
To be sure, most of the migrants who have arrived in New York and other cities came on their own — Abbott’s buses were responsible for about 20% of the 210,000 migrants who have passed through the city shelter system since 2022.
The operation was decried by many local and federal leaders as a racist use of humans as political pawns — including by Adams, who called Abbott “anti-American” for “shipping people on a bus.”
City Hall doubled down on that stance Sunday, insisting that Adams has done more to help migrants than anything Abbott’s “scheme” ever did — and calling the governor’s plan an “ill-conceived policy that has failed to deliver meaningful results for either taxpayers or migrants.”
“For over two years, Governor Abbott has used human beings as political pawns and sent thousands of migrants to New York City without any kind of communication or coordination,” a spokesperson for City Hall told The Post.
“Thanks to our 30- and 60-day policies — and intensified casework — approximately 70 percent of the migrants that have come through our care have already taken the next steps in their journeys,” the spokesperson said.
“One thing is for sure: New York City is in a much better place than we were a year ago thanks to the smart choices we’ve made,” City Hall added.
Abbott, however, argues the program not only helped migrants in the long run, but forced the nation to finally look the crisis in the face.
“Because of that process people across the country began to understand this is not a Texas issue. This is a United States issue. And it made them focus on the political issue, either at the city council level or all the way to the presidential level,” Abbott said.
“This is not a Texas issue. This is a United States issue caused by the Biden administration.”
Harris has ‘ignored’ invites
Abbott said he has repeatedly tried to blunt the impact of Biden-Harris border policies on his state.
He has ordered fortifications along the Texas stretch of the border — especially dangerous sections of the Rio Grande — including razor wire and serrated buoys, and ordered the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety to help stop and detain illegal crossers.
At every turn, the Biden administration has opposed Abbott’s moves with legal injunctions.
But Abbott’s strategy seems to be working. Border crossings in Texas have slowed to a small fraction of what they were at their peak in December 2023.
The NYC busing started in August 2022 — a month when Texas saw about about 117,000 migrants crossing the border. Two years later, this past August, there were about 28,000 crossers.
Abbott, however, said Texans cannot afford another four years of open border policy — which he believes Vice President Kamala Harris would allow.
“Coming out of Texas taxpayer pockets is far more than $10 billion of our own money to pay for border security, to deal with refusal of the Biden-Harris administration to secure the border,” he said.
Abbott said Harris has not only “ignored” the border crisis she was tasked with fixing as “border czar” — but has also completely ignored numerous invitations from Texas to come and see the state of the border firsthand.
“She has never even responded,” Abbott said, adding that “a Kamala Harris presidency could destroy Texas.”
In June 2021 — a year before Abbott’s first buses left for DC — Harris made her first visit to the southern border as vice president, a trip which included a stop in El Paso. And on Friday, she again traveled to the border, but remained in Arizona.
Tren de Aragua : ‘A very dangerous gang’
Another issue President Biden and his so-called “border czar” Harris are responsible for — and which Abbott said he has been forced to clean up — is the emergence of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on American streets.
The gang has created footholds across the country after untold individual members slipped in across the border — with 100 suspected members being caught during a single rush at the El Paso border in March.
But once again, what happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas.
Tren de Aragua now commands extensive criminal operations in NYC, Colorado and Chicago, and has even been linked to a rise in forced prostitution in eight states across the country: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Texas.
“This is all caused Biden and Harris opening the door to people from Venezuela, including gangs. There’s no data that even the Biden administration has to consider whether people coming from Venezuela are gang members or not,” Abbott said.
Venezuela is just one of several Latin American countries where about 30,000 migrants were being flown in on a monthly basis as part of a humanitarian program, which was halted in July over suspected fraud — before being started back up.
“This is a very dangerous gang,” said Abbott, who has attempted to curb the gang in his state by designating it a foreign terrorist organization, and offering $5,000 bounties for any information that leads to the capture of Tren de Aragua members.
“A lot of Americans and Texans didn’t know exactly what was going on, and so by doing what I’ve done, there’s now a greater understanding and realization about the fact that this dangerous gang is in the United States,” he said.
‘Adams wanted somebody to criticize’
Abbott’s original plan for busing migrants was a last resort. Beginning in the spring of 2022, he started sending buses of new arrivals to the nation’s capital so that the Biden-Harris administration and members of Congress could not ignore the crisis on the Texas border.
“If they refused to come to the border and see the disaster they caused, I was going to take the border to them. We were busing initially only to the sanctuary city of Washington, DC, so that the leaders there would see firsthand the chaos they caused,” Abbott said.
The NYC migrant arrivals whom Adams spoke about in July 2022 were — ironically — likely from a Biden-Harris administration program.
“Adams wanted somebody to criticize, and he probably knew it was the Biden administration, but he wanted to use me as a punching bag,” Abbott said.
“And I thought, you know what? If he thinks that we’re sending them there, we’ll live up to what his expectations are and we’ll start busing there.”
Adams, despite being a Democrat, famously developed an icy relationship with Biden over failure to help with the migrant crisis in New York.
When he was indicted on federal corruption charges last week, Adams claimed that his outspokenness on the issue made him a target of federal prosecutors.
(The indictment alleges a quid pro quo between Adams and Turkish officials that dates back to 2014 — many years before the migrant crisis.)
‘We cannot go through another four years’
Abbott — who pledged to support deportation programs proposed by former President Donald Trump — thinks the presidential election in November is a critical juncture not just for Texas, but for the US as a whole.
“We’ve had under Biden and Harris more than 11 million individuals cross the border. We cannot go through another four more years of that,” he said.
“There’s no way America can remain the country that we are if we have four more years of Kamala Harris.”
Instead, Abbott said, he wants to see another Trump presidency, and will work “collaboratively” with his administration to secure the border.
“This is a line-in-the-sand moment, when Americans must realize that our country and our future are at stake.”