MESA, Ariz. — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday, while campaigning for former President Donald Trump, criticized Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration for busing migrants to other parts of the country. Minutes later, he bragged about doing the same thing.
“When you saw 5,000 people a day crossing into a town like Eagle Pass, Texas, you could see that that was on your TV. You knew what was going on in America,” Abbott told a crowd of about 50 people gathered at a wedding venue in a Phoenix suburb. “What Harris wanted to do was to silence the critics, and they could silence the critics by making this problem go invisible.”
“They’re doing that daily, flying people across the border or through this [asylum application program], getting them to come to a port of entry, at which time they will put them on a bus and then transport them to some other place,” he said.
An internal document obtained by NBC News in 2022 revealed a plan from the Department of Homeland Security to transport migrants awaiting immigration proceedings from U.S. cities along the southern border farther into the interior of the country. Typically, migrants who are granted asylum in the United States are transported to different parts of the country by paying for it themselves or through the charity of nongovernmental organizations after being released by Customs and Border Protection.
NBC News has contacted Abbott’s team for clarification on the programs he was referencing. In response to Abbott’s claims, the Harris-Walz campaign shared a statement from a border town mayor from Bisbee, Arizona, criticizing Trump for opposing a bipartisan border bill that Senate Republicans shot down in February.
“The border bill would have made our country safer, made the border more secure,” said Mayor Ken Budge in a statement. “Now that it’s election time, JD Vance and Trump are here to campaign on the border — even though they’re responsible for blocking the most important bill we’ve seen to improve border security,” Budge added.
The attack from Abbott comes as the Trump campaign has sought to tie Harris to chaos surrounding migrants and the U.S. border. Since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump has repeatedly called Harris the “border czar” in attacks, seizing on the assignment Biden gave her in 2021 to work with Central American countries to tackle the “root causes” of migration.
Minutes after attacking Harris for busing migrants to other parts of the country, Abbott bragged about doing the same.
Recalling the steps he took when Texas began busing migrants in 2022 under Operation Lone Star, Abbott boasted that the program “began busing them to Washington, D.C., and then dropping them off at the address of the residence of the vice president of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.” Applause and cheers reverberated throughout the campaign event.
“If you were a sanctuary city, you were on the list to be bused to because you volunteered,” said Abbott of his formulation of the busing program. “You said, ‘We welcome you here until you get there,’” he said. “It shows the hypocrisy of the Democrats.”
During the Republican National Convention in July, Abbott vowed that “buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.” Buses sending migrants to blue cities have not been sent out on a consistent basis for months; in all of July no buses left Texas, according to data obtained by NBC News.
In June, a Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that Border Patrol agents stopped roughly 84,000 migrants crossing the U.S. southern border, the lowest monthly number since Biden took office in 2021. The Biden administration attributed the low numbers to new asylum restrictions implemented earlier that month.
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