ANALYSIS: Northeast cities face reality of southwest border crisis with migrant busing

Cracks have begun to show in big city Democrats’ support for open borders far, far away as recent arrivals started showing up on their doorstep in droves.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams vented his frustration about the newcomers at a press conference on Thursday last week, at which time he called the Republican governors of Arizona and Texas “cowards” and accused them of busing border crossers to his city.

Adams had appealed to the Biden administration for federal funding to ease the “burden” the influx of illegal immigrants was putting on New York City’s social services earlier that week.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Pete Ducey began sending migrants who arrived at the U.S. southern border to Washington D.C.’s Union Station in April after months of inaction from the Biden administration.

The move was designed to send a message to White House officials and members of Congress so the burden didn’t fall entirely on their states in the southwest.

To date, more than 5,200 migrants have reportedly been bused from Texas and another 1,100 from Arizona, according to those gubernatorial offices.

But both governors denied sending any migrants directly to the Big Apple and instead pointed to Biden’s border policies, which include secret flights from Texas to an airport near New York City.

Abbott said in a statement Friday that Adams’ problem was not with Texas but with “President Biden’s refusal to stop this border crisis and secure our southern border."

“Texas has not bused any migrants to New York,” he added.

“Instead, it is President Biden who has flown planeloads of migrants to New York. Mayor Adams should address his frustration with migrants to the root cause: Joe Biden.”

In October, the New York Post reported that planes originating from Texas had been landing at Westchester County Airport, about 30 miles north of NYC, between midnight and around 6:30 a.m. since August.

Cameras showed crowds of young people disembarking flights at the airport under the watchful eye of local police, many of whom were later seen being dropped off at a Long Island shelter.

The situation exposed the Democrats’ fear of appearing contemptuous and unkind toward illegal immigrants – who they enjoy framing as victims for political points. To deflect political damage to the Democratic Party, Mayor Adams chose to blame Republican governors instead of the White House, which is actually in charge of the policy.

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser took a similar approach, claiming the illegal migrants filling up her city’s shelters were being “tricked” onto buses in Texas and Arizona.

“We have for sure called on the federal government to work across state lines to prevent people from really being tricked into getting on buses,” Bowser said during a CBS interview last Sunday about the recent arrivals.

Bowser’s statement asserts that migrants illegally crossing the border are being cruelly manipulated when they are relocated from the southwest to the northeast. But that downplays the intelligence of asylum seekers who chose to accept the harsh challenge of making their way across the continent to reach the U.S. border in the first place.

As one Washington Post reader put it in a letter to the editor, the cruelty is not in the relocation, but rather the Biden administration's inaction on dispelling the illusion that the border crossers will be taken care of.  

“The only difference is that we, who do not live in a border state, are now getting a taste of what the Americans who live in border states have been experiencing for a year: the scramble to help these people, the scramble to find shelter for them, to feed and clothe them, to find work for them, and then the cost of it all,” wrote Marie Miller, who lives in a suburb outside D.C. 

“What the Biden administration is doing is not kind or compassionate but uncaring and heartless,” she added.

Meanwhile, the blue city mayors’ attempts to shield their own states from the massive influx is a sign the southwestern governors’ strategies are working. 

In time, the governors’ tactics may increase pressure on the Biden administration to take the action necessary to secure the entire nation and put an end to the mixed messages percolating from the White House to Latin America, where caravans continue to head north.

“Now that big city East Coast mayors are being confronted with the ripple effects of a border security and humanitarian crisis, maybe something will get done,” CJ Karamargin, communications director for Gov. Ducey, told The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

“That is certainly our hope."