Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot chastised Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over his most recent plan to bus migrants out of his state. Lightfoot derides Abbott’s busing plan as an “inhumane and dangerous action,” but her complaints are misdirected:
Abbott’s not to blame for the migrants who are drawing down Chicago’s resources — President Biden is.
Since taking office, Joe Biden has released more than two million Southwest border migrants. That’s a population of individuals larger than 14 U.S. states, and a figure that doesn’t include nearly a million other “got aways,” aliens who have entered illegally and evaded overwhelmed Border Patrol agents since the start of FY 2022.
Texas has borne the brunt of that migrant surge. Of the 2.2 million-plus aliens apprehended by agents at the U.S.-Mexico line last fiscal year (an all-time record), nearly two-thirds — more than 63% — were caught in one of Border Patrol’s five Texas sectors.
Last April, as small Texas towns like Uvalde and Carrizo Springs struggled to deal with scores of illegal border crossers who were being released daily by DHS onto their streets with no resources and no way out, Abbott started busing migrants north, first to Washington, D.C. and then to New York, Chicago, and other large cities.
Those cities — which had previously lauded their commitments to immigrant communities — quickly complained when they had to provide food, shelter, and medical care to those newly arrived migrants, even though they were better able than any border community to do so. Demands from officials in those cities for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid soon followed.
Those demands have subsequently taken a sour turn, with Mayor Eric Adams now calling on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop giving money to localities for buses to send migrants to his city.
That’s NIMBYism at its worst.
And if anything, such proposals will simply make an already dire situation worse. Texas border cities, including El Paso and Laredo, already straining under migrant releases, have declared states of emergency in advance of the end of Title 42 on May 11. Once Title 42 is lifted, the daily migrant flow is expected to double.
Instead of blaming Abbott and those struggling border communities, Adams and Lightfoot should direct their anger at President Biden, because it’s his “non-detention policies” that are driving the waves of migrants across the border and into their cities.
That was the conclusion of federal Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in his recent opinion in a case brought by the state of Florida challenging Biden’s release policies, which the court found “were akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign” for would-be migrants.
As Judge Wetherell put it: “The unprecedented ‘surge’ of aliens that started arriving at the Southwest Border almost immediately after President Biden took office and that has continued unabated over the past two years was a predictable consequence of” the administration’s actions.
Biden’s Department of Justice hasn’t appealed that decision, likely because the court was correct in its conclusions. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the White House from blaming its border fiasco on the Trump administration’s alleged “gutting” of the immigration system — a contention as nonsensical as it is deceptive.
While I can understand that Lightfoot and Adams are frustrated at the prospect of having to spend even more taxpayer dollars caring for their burgeoning migrant populations, it’s time for them to place the blame for their fiscal challenges where it belongs — not on Abbott or the Texas border towns on the front lines of this disaster, but on their fellow Democrat, Joe Biden.
Andrew Arthur is the Center for Immigration Studies’ resident fellow in law and policy.