As the southern border regions buckle under the flood of migrants currently being released from Customs and Border Protection custody, the city of McAllen has joined the busing program run by state governor Greg Abbott.

The controversial sanctuary city busing scheme has seen at least at least 6,500 migrants sent to New York, 9,300 to Washington, DC, 1,800 to Chicago and 970 to Philadelphia.

Leaders in those cities are already struggling to accommodate the huge influx of people who have arrived this year.

Abbott also authorized sending his first bus to Denver on Wednesday, a city which says it has seen 10,000 migrants arrive in 2023 and spent $15.7 million on supporting them since December.

About 200 migrants a day have been loading onto buses in the small border town of McAllen, Catholic Charities of Rio Grande Valley told The Post.

The organization helps to arrange travel for migrants, once they are legally in the US seeking asylum if they do not have the money to travel to their final destination in the country.

“We were never in agreement with the buses [in McAllen] because there were no need for them,” Sister Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities told The Post — adding that changed in the days leading up to the end of Title 42 on May 11, when 10,000 migrants a day started crossing over the border from Mexico.

“Right now, when we start to see the high numbers, and they approached us to see if we were interested in the buses, and I said, ‘Yes, of course.”

All migrants leaving the McAllen area have a friend or relative who will take them in, Pimentel added.

“It’s been working out. We’ve been sending the buses to New York and Chicago. We notify the city government. We notify the Catholic Charities, the bishop in those cities, and we let them know when they’re going to arrive.”

Pimentel confirmed Wednesday they had been getting together migrants to fill a charter to Colordao, which arrived on Thursday.

Meanwhile, officials in El Paso have confirmed they are willing to start working with Abbott to alleviate strain on what’s been the most busy spot for migrants crossing into the nation for over a year — which could result in thousands more people arriving in sanctuary cities.

“We will utilize some of the state buses…but only the ones that we control the destination — which is the destination that’s been asked for by our asylum seekers,” Mayor Oscar Leeser said during a May 4 press conference after the city declared a state of emergency in response to the border crisis.

While there is currently no busing taking place out of El Paso, the Democratic city’s willingness to work with the Republican governor now, after resisting for months, surprised former City Council Claudia Rodriguez, who left office in January.

“It was very political…the optics of it — they were afraid to let the governor in,” Rodriguez recalled.

Abbott has declared the program necessary to help overwhelmed border communities, but elected leaders in El Paso charged that he used migrants as political pawns, as some have been sent to the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Rodriguez, a rare Republican in Texas’s sixth largest city, believes her former colleagues who claimed not to trust Abbott bus program quickly changed their tune after spending millions of local dollars to launch their own migrant bus program from August to October in 2022.

“Really quickly, we racked up a bill of almost $10 million,” Rodriguez detailed. “Now the state of Texas can come and they’re the ones who are going to be responsible for doing the operation.”

Whether forced into collaborating with the Republican state leader because of money or to save their own towns, local leaders still put distance between them and Abbott’s program.

“If you start getting into the politics at the statewide level, the question of whether you’re cooperating with the governor or not becomes moot if what we’re doing is recognizing that it’s not the governor who is at the head of this fight — it is the federal authorities who are at the head of this fight,” Hidalgo County Spokesman Carlos Sanchez told The Post.

McAllen is in Hidalgo County and is allowing Catholic Charities to use a county park to get migrants loaded onto the buses. Sanchez told The Post the City of McAllen is really in charge.

“We were expecting a big surge with the end of Title 42 and so that need was there, but that’s being processed through Catholic Charities,” McAllen Spokeswoman Xochitl Mora said.

Sister Pimentel said her organization has had no direct contact with the governor’s office and the City of McAllen acting as a go-between.

As for the future of the partnership, Pimentel said it depends on how many migrants continue walking through the shelter’s doors.

“If there’s no need, there’s no buses,” she added.