Greg Abbott Is Going Out of His Way to Create Chaos in Chicago and New York

For the better part of two years, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been sending migrants from the southern US border to sanctuary cities—an endeavor, he claims, that is meant to provide “relief to overwhelmed border communities,” but that has seemingly been about scoring political points and sowing chaos. That’s never been more apparent than in recent weeks as he defies efforts by northern cities to systematize arrivals and counter the escalation of his inhumane stunt.

Chicago and New York began imposing restrictions last month on “rogue” buses that drop migrants off outside approved locations as they seek to handle the crisis. But rather than coordinating with the cities’ Democratic leadership, Abbott has gone to even more extreme lengths—chartering planes to send migrants north and sending asylum-seekers to locations outside city limits, all without notice.

More than 300 migrants arrived Sunday at a train station in Rockford, a city of 150,000 about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago, whose leaders said they were not notified by their counterparts in Texas. “Governor Abbott is determined to continue to sow seeds of chaos,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson told CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday. That same day, at least four more buses arrived in New Jersey, where Abbott has sent hundreds of migrants since New York Mayor Eric Adams issued an executive order regulating drop-offs. “It seems quite clear the bus operators are finding a way to thwart the requirements of the executive order by dropping migrants at the train station in Secaucus and having them continue to their final destination,” Secaucus Mayor Michael Gonnelli said in a statement Sunday.

Abbott’s latest moves underscore the cruelty of his campaign, which started in protest of President Joe Biden’s border policies. He is using human beings as pawns in his political gamesmanship and making it as dangerous as possible for them by undermining efforts by local leaders to coordinate the arrivals. “Putting people on airplanes and dropping them off in the city of Chicago and Denver, New York, without any coordination, without a manifest—I don’t know how many federal laws or aviation laws he can be violating,” Johnson said Sunday. “But this type of chaos is not what’s needed in this moment.”

That chaos is sure to intensify this year ahead of the November election as Republicans look to exploit the recent surge in migrants entering the country. House Speaker Mike Johnson and members of his conference—which has been holding up a foreign aid package seeking hardline border policies—are kicking off the new year with a trip to Texas on Wednesday. Meanwhile, GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has made an even more extreme anti-immigration agenda a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign. Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country,” the former president said at a rally last month.

President Joe Biden and others have rightly condemned that rhetoric, noting its echoes to that of Adolf Hitler. But Abbott and other Republican extremists are trying to make the story about Democrats’ struggles to contain the humanitarian crisis instead of the GOP’s inhumanity in the face of it—especially, perhaps, in Chicago, where Democrats will hold their convention in August. “There’s no secret here that we need comprehensive immigration reform,” Johnson said over the weekend. “But what we can’t have is a governor in the state of Texas acting the way he is acting.”