Illinois governor asks Abbott to pause migrant busing
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Friday urged Gov. Greg Abbott to stop sending migrants to Chicago while the city grapples with a winter storm that is expected to send temperatures plunging below zero over the weekend.
Abbott, a Republican, has sent more than 100,000 migrants on buses and planes to a handful of Democratic-controlled cities far from the southern border, including more than 30,000 to Chicago since August 2022, Abbott’s office said Friday. Pritzker, in a letter to Abbott, said the trips would prove “life-threatening to every one of the arrivals” if they continued during the storm.
“I strongly urge you to stop sending people to Illinois in these conditions. You are dropping off asylum seekers without alerting us to their arrivals, at improper locations at all hours of the night,” Pritzker, a Democrat, wrote, adding that he was “hoping to appeal to your humanity.”
Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said the busing is designed to call attention to a record surge of migration across the U.s.-mexico border and to spread the burden of sheltering migrants and asylum-seekers beyond the border.
The initiative has revealed that Democrats are “for illegal immigration as long as it’s Texas and the border states” that have to deal with it, Abbott said on Fox News last week.
“They profess to be sanctuary cities and sanctuary states,” he said. “They want to welcome them in until they actually do come in. And then when they come in, they say, ‘no, no, no, no, no, we don’t want them here.’ ”
In his letter to Abbott, Pritzker acknowledged there is “much more that needs to be done by the federal government to provide aid to asylum seekers and to secure the border.”
“I understand that the border crisis is untenable for border states,” Pritzker wrote. “Illinois, and all other states, especially Texas, ought to lobby Congress immediately to vote for bipartisan immigration reform.”
But in the meantime, Pritzker argued, Abbott’s busing initiative is placing “(h)undreds of children’s and families’ health and survival” at risk due to his “callousness.”
“We should be able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to urge Congress to act,” Pritzker wrote. “But right now, we are talking about human beings and their survival. I hope we can at least agree on saving lives right now.”
The letter comes a day after Abbott faced backlash for saying that Texas is doing everything it can to stop border crossings, short of shooting migrants because the Biden administration would “charge us with murder.”
The governor said Friday that he was asked by a conservative commentator to “legally distinguish between what Texas has the legal authority to do and what would be illegal to do,” and he “pointed out something that is obviously illegal.”