Texas Gov. Greg Abbott attacks Harris for busing migrants, then brags about his own busing program

MESA, Ariz. — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday criticized Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration for moving migrants to other parts of the country while campaigning for former President Donald Trump. A few minutes later he was bragging about doing the same.

“When you see 5,000 people a day moving into a town like Eagle Pass, Texas, you can see it’s on your TV. You knew what was going on in America,” Abbott told a crowd of about 50 people gathered at a wedding venue outside Phoenix. “What Harris wanted to do was silence critics, and they could silence critics by making the problem invisible.”

“They do it every day, they fly people over the border or here [asylum application program]to bring them to the port of entry where they will be put on a bus and then transported elsewhere,” he said.

Internal document obtained by NBC News in 2022 revealed his plan Moving migrants awaiting immigration processing from the Department of Homeland Security further inland from US cities along the southern border. Typically, migrants who have received asylum in the United States are transported to different parts of the country after being released by Customs and Border Protection at their own expense or through the charity of non-governmental organizations.

NBC News reached out to Abbott’s team for clarification on the programs it was referring to. 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. Senate Republicans were shot in February.

“The border bill would make our country safer, make the border more secure,” said Mayor Ken Budge. “Now 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 ever seen to improve border security,” Budge said.

Abbott’s attack comes as the Trump campaign tries to tie Harris to the chaos surrounding migrants and the US border. Since Harris rose to the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump has repeatedly called out Harris “border king” attacks, Biden seized on his 2021 mandate to work with Central American countries to address the “root causes” of migration.

Moments after attacking Harris for moving migrants to other parts of the country, Abbott boasted about doing the same.

Recalling the steps he took when Texas began transporting migrants by bus as part of Operation Lone Star in 2022, Abbott noted that the program “started taking them by bus to Washington and then dropping them off at the residence of the vice president of the United States.” From America, Kamala Harris.” Cheers and cheers echoed throughout the campaign.

“If you were a sanctuary city, you were on the list to be bused because you volunteered,” said Abbott, who designed the bus program. You said, ‘We welcome you here until we get there,'” he said. “That shows the hypocrisy of the Democrats.”

During the Republican National Convention in July, Abbott took the oath “The buses will continue to run until we finally secure our border.” Buses that send migrants to the blue cities have been missing for months; According to information obtained by NBC News, there was no bus from Texas for the entire month of July.

In June, a Department of Homeland Security official This was reported by NBC News Border Patrol agents stopped about 84,000 migrants from crossing the US southern border, the lowest monthly number since Biden took office in 2021. The Biden administration is attributed a lower number of new asylum restrictions imposed earlier that month.