by Jennie Taer
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday that he’d sent a bus of illegal migrants to Chicago as he continues to send them to other Democratic cities in the northeast.
“Mayor Lightfoot loves to tout the responsibility of her city to welcome all regardless of legal status, and I look forward to seeing this responsibility in action as these migrants receive resources from a sanctuary city with the capacity to serve them,” Abbott said in a statement.
Abbott began busing migrants to Washington, D.C. in April in response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) announcement that Title 42, the public health order used to quickly expel migrants amid the COVID-19 pandemic, would end May 23. The order remains due to a federal judge’s decision to pause the Biden administration’s action to end it.
In early August, Abbott announced that he’d send additional buses to New York City.
“President Biden’s inaction at our southern border continues putting the lives of Texans—and Americans—at risk and is overwhelming our communities. To continue providing much-needed relief to our small, overrun border towns, Chicago will join fellow sanctuary cities Washington, D.C. and New York City as an additional drop-off location,” Abbott said.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s deputy communications director Ryan Johnson responded Wednesday, saying that the city is “welcoming” towards migrants and that “racism, discrimination, and human cruelty” contributed to Abbott’s action. Johnson said roughly 60 migrants would be arriving in Chicago.
We know that racism, discrimination, and human cruelty have played a pivotal role in how immigrants are received within our borders, and we are still working to recover from the previous presidential administration, which encouraged this behavior. https://t.co/jt2Nl1O31T
— Ryan Johnson (@Ryan_Johnson) September 1, 2022
Lightfoot joins Democrat Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and New York City Mayor Eric Adams in their criticism of Abbott’s efforts.
“This is horrific when you think about what the governor of Texas is doing,” Adams recently said. “After months of traveling across the border, place them on the bus with no direction to come here to New York. And New York is a city that has always represented the Democratic values, the values of our city, showing our compassion, that’s what we’re doing today.”
Bowser claimed in July that the illegal migrants were “tricked” into coming to Washington. However, illegal migrants who took the buses from Arizona recently told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the effort was “voluntary.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection authorities are on pace to surpass 2 million migrant encounters at the southern border in fiscal year 2022, according to agency statistics.
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Jennie Taer is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Lori Lightfoot” by Lori Lightfoot.
