It looks like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may use a dictionary.
Why? As a result of on Sunday, the Republican went on Fox Information and accused President Joe Biden of “utilizing unlawful immigrants as political pawns.” And given his personal document, it’s unclear if understands what the phrase means.
Chessboards apart, Oxford Languages says a pawn is “an individual utilized by others for their very own functions.” This, in fact, describes how Abbott has himself handled migrants who’ve crossed the border into Texas.
Since 2022, he bussed hundreds of them to Democratic-controlled New York Metropolis and Washington, D.C. The arrival of greater than 150,000 migrants in New York since that point has created a humanitarian disaster that town authorities has struggled to adequately handle, leaving many migrants bearing harsh circumstances and caught in shelters.
New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams has sued greater than a dozen constitution bus contractors that helped transport the migrants to town beneath Abbott’s route, alleging that the businesses violated town’s Social Companies Regulation, which requires that anybody who brings “a needy particular person from out of state” to New York Metropolis to cowl the ensuing bills. Final month, one of many bus corporations agreed in courtroom papers to halt transporting migrants from the southern border to town, Politico reported.
However this week, when Abbott got here to New York for a Republican fundraiser, he made it clear he has no plans to cease sending migrants to New York for his personal functions—not less than for so long as Biden stays president. “We’re going to have to keep up this course of till we get a brand new president this subsequent November who will safe the border for the US of America,” the governor advised the gathering, in keeping with Gothamist.
Late final yr, Abbott signed a regulation making undocumented immigration into Texas a state crime and permitting state regulation enforcement officers to arrest undocumented immigrants anyplace inside its boundaries. The problem is wrapped up in litigation, with Biden’s Division of Justice arguing that the regulation violates the Structure, which “assigns the federal authorities the authority to control immigration and handle our worldwide borders.”
The rationale behind Abbott’s rhetoric isn’t laborious to pin down: Draconian anti-immigration insurance policies—together with separating kids from their dad and mom—have turn into a cornerstone of at present’s GOP, who don’t truly appear concerned with funding border safety, on condition that Republican lawmakers not too long ago blocked a bipartisan invoice to just do that.
Whereas Abbott’s menace to maintain busing immigrants north may additional burnish his anti-immigrant credentials, it pales when in comparison with one other he made earlier this yr. As I reported in January, he advised a right-wing radio host that “the one factor that we aren’t doing is we’re not capturing individuals who come throughout the border—as a result of, in fact, the Biden administration would cost us with homicide.”
That’s what we’d name utilizing immigrants as political pawns.