A Texas border town official chided Mayor Adams Saturday for his furious reaction to the Lone Star State’s new push to bus asylum seekers to the Big Apple and other northern cities.
“You see New York, you see Washington [DC] kind of drowning with a few buses,” McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos scoffed in an interview with Fox News.
“The city of McAllen was able to deal with thousands of immigrants a day,” Villalobos said. “I think they can handle a few hundred.”
Adams and Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser have been appealing for federal help and slamming Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as “inhumane,” after he began sending fleets of migrant-filled buses to their self-proclaimed sanctuary cities.
“Mayor Adams said that they welcome in illegal immigrants,” Abbott, a Republican, said Wednesday. “And now once they have to deal with the reality of it, they’re suddenly flummoxed and they cannot handle it.”
The nation’s southern border has been reporting record highs of migrant encounters and apprehensions since President Biden took office last year – with June marking the fourth month in a row to hit more than 200,000 stops.
On Tuesday, Adams threatened to take a busload of New Yorkers to Texas and campaign against Abbott’s re-election bid.
Texas has bused about 360 migrants to New York City in the last week, the governor’s office reported Friday, and has sent more than 6,800 illegal immigrants to the nation’s capital since April.
Villalobos called the New York-bound migrants “a little bit lucky in a sense” — because they’re getting to hitch their rides at the state of Texas’s expense.
“Their intent has never been to stay here in South Texas,” the mayor maintained. “They intend to go up north.”
Adams’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
