One of the enduring stories during the Biden administration’s disastrous experiment with surrendering our national borders has been Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing of illegal aliens to sanctuary cities.

While Americans who believe in law and order saw it as just desserts for reckless sanctuary mayors, the mayors and their fellow travelers saw it as kidnapping and human trafficking.

If the latter position sounds like a joke, it comes with the punchline.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, one of Abbott’s fiercest critics for sending migrants to his city, is now buying thousands of bus and plane tickets to send migrants to Texas and other states.

Volumes could be written on the rank hypocrisy of this action. When Abbott began busing migrants in the summer of 2022, Adams and other sanctuary mayors boasted that their cities could handle the influx while simultaneously vilifying the Texas governor for his alleged cruelty. 

"This is horrific when you think about what the governor is doing," Adams said at the time. "We're finding that some of the families are on the bus that wanted to go to other locations, and they were not allowed to do so," the mayor said. "They were forced on the bus with the understanding that they were going to other locations that they wanted to go to, and when they tried to explain they were not allowed to do so."

A few months later, Adams vented further on the purported unfairness of Texas sending migrants to New York City.

“New Yorkers are angry. I’m angry, too. We have not asked for this,” Adams said. “There was never any agreement to take on the job of supporting thousands of asylum seekers.”

How do we know that Adams isn’t misleading the outbound migrants the same way he claims Abbott did?

Did Texas ask for a nonstop flow of illegal aliens?

Did New York secure agreements with Texas and other states before shipping migrants to them?

Adams surely has incentive to unload the migrants as quickly as possible. Since Abbott began sending migrants out of his state, New York City has been swamped with over 200,000 new arrivals that the city has struggled mightily to house and feed. This pales in comparison to the millions of foreign nationals who have entered Texas illegally under the Biden White House’s border stampede. 

Critics have assailed Abbott not just for performing what they claimed to be a political stunt, but for having much darker motivations.

Amy Fischer, organizer with the anti-borders Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network group, ripped Abbott on MSNBC in 2002 for busing migrants to Washington, D.C. “They deserve to be welcomed with dignity and with care,” she said of the migrants, adding that “we know that Gov. Abbott is sending these buses with the most racist, xenophobic intentions.”

How does she know that precisely? Why isn’t New York under fire for acting out on racist motives in doing the same thing Abbott did?

The answers to those questions are obvious. Anti-borders activists and politicians see themselves on the side of the angels. Never mind that sanctuary policies have been proven to result in higher crime, overcrowding and chaos wherever they are applied. If the intentions or at least the professed intentions sound noble, then the architects of those policies should not be held accountable for the nightmarish results.

The same benefit of the doubt is not applied on the other side of the issue, however. If the governor of an overwhelmed state like Texas takes action to expose the folly of sanctuary policies that attract illegal aliens, it is assumed he is acting upon the worst possible motivations. Similarly, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conduct targeted enforcement operations to arrest violent criminal aliens, they are depicted not as protecting American communities, but of being jack-booted thugs enforcing cruel, nativist laws.

For all the sanctuary propaganda about welcoming ordinances and immigrants making communities stronger, there comes a tipping point at which reality can no longer be ignored. There are limits to the numbers of illegal aliens that a city and a nation can absorb. City and state resources are finite. Legal residents have limits at which they will no longer tolerate their government prioritizing illegal aliens above them. We long ago surpassed these limits, and it is no coincidence that the nation has been deteriorating ever since.

Given the wreckage mass illegal immigration has caused in their cities the last few years, one might think Adams, other sanctuary mayors and their respective city councils would see the light and reverse their irresponsible policies. That will only be possible when their constituents stand up with one voice and demand a long-overdue reversal to this madness.

Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C, and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.

Image: Screen shot from CBS New York video, via YouTube