(NewsNation) — Texas hasn’t bused migrants to other states in about two months as unauthorized crossings decline, according to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Southwest land border encounters have steeply declined since May and were down more than 20% year over year as of July, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Abbott announced last September that Texas had bused more than 35,000 migrants to so-called sanctuary cities over the span of a year.
On Tuesday, however, Abbott told NewsNation that crossings have slowed significantly.
“For about the past two months almost, the crossings have been down so much we haven’t actually had the volume of people to bus to other locations,” Abbott said.
Texas started busing hundreds of thousands of migrants to Democrat-led cities in 2022. The decision was an act of protest against federal border policies and aimed to redirect immigration-related resource strain toward those who may not otherwise feel its effects.
Months of speculation that Abbott would send busloads of migrants to Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in August never came to fruition.
The Chicago Department of Family and Support Services credited the decline in crossings to President Joe Biden’s executive order that created restrictions for asylum-seekers if more than 2,500 people crossed in a single day.
Abbott, however, celebrated Texas’ efforts, including the construction of a wall separating the state from Mexico as well as New Mexico.
“We stay ready and prepared to start the busing operations again if people make the mistake of coming into the state of Texas,” Abbott said.
The governor expects crossings to increase in the coming months, citing caravans of people migrating toward the United States via the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.
He framed ongoing immigration at the nation’s southern border as a safety risk that can only be solved by electing a new president.
“Let’s assume Texas does succeed in reducing illegal immigration 100% into our state — which is our goal — all those terrorists, all those murders, all those rapists, they’re just going to go through New Mexico and Arizona and California,” Abbott said. “We solved the Texas problem, but not the United States problem. That requires a new president to make sure that we are actually going to secure our border.”
Several high-profile criminal cases involving noncitizens have made headlines this year, spurring proposals to limit federal immigration agents’ authority to release detained immigrants.
Conversations surrounding those cases may skew the public perception of how frequently immigrants commit crimes in the U.S.
A 2023 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that people born in the U.S. are more likely to go to prison compared to noncitizens.
Over a 150-year period, immigrants’ incarceration rate was slightly lower than that of U.S.-born men. Data from a more recent period revealed that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens and 30% less likely relative to U.S.-born white citizens.