Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday accused the Biden administration of busing asylum seekers throughout the United States before boasting that he bused migrants out of his state.
In a sparsely attended Arizona stump speech for Donald Trump, Abbott rallied against Vice President Kamala Harris, who Republicans have dubbed the “border czar” in an attempt to associate her with an uptick in asylum-seekers.
“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 said, per NBC News. “They’re doing that daily, flying people across the border or through this [asylum 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.”
Abbott, who bused new arrivals to the U.S. to Washington and New York City between 2022 and 2024, bragged later in that same speech that he “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.”
Unlike the federal government’s response, Abbott’s moves were criticized as cruel and potentially illegal. The Biden administration accepted asylum seekers in accordance with the law, but there is no evidence to suggest that it engaged in busing migrants, as Abbott suggested, according to NBC News.
Still, Republicans have attempted to strike Harris on the administration’s immigration record, even as border crossings fall to their lowest level since before Biden took office, and after Trump reportedly killed a bipartisan border security bill to boost his own election bid.