Texas Governor Greg Abbott has defied NYC Mayor Eric Adams demands on when migrants can arrive in the city – with the latest busload set to be dropped off just as the Times Square ball drops on New Years Eve.
Last week Adams issued an executive order that buses could only arrive at Port Authority to drop off migrants between 8:30 a.m. and 12 p.m. from Monday to Friday unless given permission to do otherwise.
Despite this a bus headed to the Big Apple filled with around 50 asylum seekers left El Paso, Texas around 11a.m. on Saturday morning.
The bus, whose passengers include women and children, is scheduled to arrive Sunday night in Gotham, just before midnight, the charter driver told DailyMail.com.
‘We have to be back on the road by midnight,’ he said. ‘Everyone will be celebrating New Year’s, and we’ll be driving back.’
Migrants in New York City are seen being bused to a shelter, after arriving from Texas
Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, on Wednesday held a joint press conference with the mayors of Chicago and Denver, who are also struggling to deal with the surge in migrant arrivals
Texas officials would not confirm if they had received permission to leave migrants in New York outside the time decreed by Adams.
The two-man driving team were later scolded by state officials for speaking with DailyMail.com.
When asked about Adams’ executive order, a Venezuelan woman headed to New York on the Texas bus said: ‘We’re not all the same. Maybe some migrants who are already there did things they weren’t supposed to do.
‘We’re going to there to work. We just need a chance’ she added.
The woman, who did not wish to be named but said she was traveling with her 11-year-old daughter, said they entered the US through El Paso on Christmas Day.
They were excited about making New York their final destination after leaving Venezuela nearly two months ago.
‘Work, that’s all we want is work,’ a migrant man standing next to the mom and daughter chimed in.
Migrants are seen arriving in Chicago, on a bus from Texas
Chicago has spent $138 million on the crisis that is only expected to get worse as temperatures drop as winter goes on
Officials from the City of El Paso have been working with state officials to bus over 17,000 migrants out of the West Texas city
In a similar move to New York, Chicago has also cracked down on how and when buses from Texas can drop off migrants.
Another bus headed to Denver left before noon, and three buses were waiting to be filled.
The mayor of that city and elected officials of Chicago suburbs have passed local ordinances requiring Texas to give Illinois officials notice and also regulating where migrants can be dropped off since it often ties up local resources.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott chartered a private plane for about 120 migrants earlier this month to avoid Chicago’s road blocks, and has said more planes will be coming.
In border towns like El Paso, where migrants showing up to turn themselves in to federal authorities never stops, getting people on a bus to their final destination is crucial to keeping local resources from collapsing.
The migrant shelters in West Texas are full and a vacant middle turned shelter is now housing migrants.
Beleaguered Eagle Pass had over 22,000 migrants show up in their small town in just one week, Border Patrol confirmed.
The town’s population is only 28,000.
‘Texas communities like Eagle Pass and El Paso should not have to shoulder the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration caused by President Biden’s reckless open border policies,’ Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has previously said.
It comes as around 1,300 migrants were making their way through the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua since Christmas Day.
A second huge wave could arrive at the border in several weeks, when a massive caravan, 6,000-8,000 people, currently in southern Mexico, arrives.
El Paso, which spent most of last year as the epicenter of the border crisis, has three larger processing centers that were built in the last 12 months specifically to handle migrant surges at the border.
Although the city is seeing about 1,000 migrant encounters a day – far less than in the current hot spots of Lukeville, Arizona or Eagle Pass, Texas, where ten times that number are crossing – officials here have the ability to quickly ramp up their response if that number peaks.