More buses filled with migrants left Texas bound for New York City Friday, despite Gov. Kathy Hochul’s insistence there is no more room for them.
Buses chartered by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as part of his bid to give non-border states a taste of the migrant crisis left from Del Rio and Eagle Pass for the Big Apple, as the pipeline of migrants from the border to big cities continues.
Statistics published by The Post this week showed 1.23 million migrants have been legally allowed over the border to pursue asylum claims in the last 11 months, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonprofit at Syracuse University.
Of those migrants, 95,000 said they were heading to New York City so far in 2023, according to the TRAC data. City Hall says around 60,000 are still in the 200 shelters the city has set up across the five boroughs and continue to strain resources.
An eyewitness at Eagle Pass — currently the flashpoint of the border crisis — said around three dozen migrants boarded the bus, a mix of single adults and families.
They said: “There were at least six young children, including an infant with a yellow onesie who boarded. They said it would be a long bus ride, and will take around two and half days to reach New York City.”
Another bus left from the town bound for Chicago. On Friday Gov. Abbott announced he would beproviding more buses from Eagle Pass to destinations across the US for migrants.
He also announced he would start to bus people out of El Paso, a Democrat-controlled city which has long resisted allowing the governor to run buses, but which is also overwhelmed.
Sources told The Post Friday the city is expecting an influx as large as 9,000 in coming days as more large caravans of asylum seekers make their way to the border.
Abbott said in a press release: “President Biden’s continued refusal to secure our border invites thousands of illegal crossings into Texas and our nation each day.
“Texas communities like Eagle Pass and El Paso should not have to shoulder the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration … I have directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to deploy additional buses to send these migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities and provide much-needed relief to our overrun border towns.”
Buses chartered by Abbott represent only a drop in the ocean of the huge wave of migrants. Most either fund their own way once they are over the border or are helped by numerous charity organizations, traveling by bus or plane to their final destinations all over the country.
Shortly before the bus in Eagle Pass left, another bus full of migrants from Del Rio in Texas arrived at New York Port Authority bus station.
The clearly exhausted inhabitants were ushered off and placed on another bus which took them to the migrant intake center at the Roosevelt hotel.
Like the 14,000 who have arrived in the city last month they will be assigned a hotel or shelter to stay in, but may not be able to live there as long as otherhes, who have stayed for months.
Hochul supports nixing New York City’s “right to shelter” law which guarantees a bed to anyone who asks for one.
She told CNN Wednesday the rule was never meant to “house literally the entire world,” adding: “Never was it envisioned being an unlimited universal right, or obligation on the city, to house literally the entire world.”
The Adams administration wants to impose a deadline on how long migrants can expect the city to pay for their stays — 30 days for single adults, 60 days for families.
This week, the Biden administration said it will offer temporary legal status to an estimated 472,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the country as of July 31, in part pushed by calls from Adams and Hochul to allow more migrants in New York to work legally, rather than turning to the black economy.
Federal laws prevent asylum seekers from applying for a work permit until six months after their asylum application is filed, to discourage people from claiming asylm for purely economic reasons.