The Biden government announced last week that the order expires on May 23. “To help local officials whose communities are flooded with hordes of illegal immigrants disembarking from the administration, Texas is providing chartered buses to send these illegal immigrants disembarked from the Biden administration to Washington,” he said. he said during a news conference Wednesday along the U.S.-Mexico border in Weslaco, Texas. The state has amassed a pool of up to 900 buses for the operation, according to Texas Emergency Management Officer Nim Kidd, who joined the governor Wednesday. An immigrant who was processed and released by the Department of Homeland Security “must volunteer to be transported and show DHS documents” in order to board a bus or flight, according to a press release from the governor’s office. Abbott, who is running for re-election this year, has been a vocal critic of President Joe Biden’s White House, supporting the rise of immigrants in his immigration policies, although there have been peaks during the Trump administration. The governor’s latest effort is part of a series of initiatives over the past year to curb undocumented immigrants entering the United States from Mexico and to border police. By the end of Title 42, the federal government is planning up to 18,000 illegal immigrants to cross the border every day, in the worst case scenario, Abbott said. “This is more than half a million illegal immigrants every month from more than 150 different countries around the world,” the governor said. “This is far beyond what Home Secretary Johnson said was a crisis. It is unprecedented and dangerous.” The U.S. Border Patrol chief told CNN last month that he was preparing to arrest up to 8,000 people daily this spring. Deteriorating conditions in Latin America, exacerbated by the pandemic, are among the causes for immigration. Also Wednesday, Abbott signed what he called a “zero tolerance policy” for unsafe vehicles used to smuggle migrants across borders and said it would be implemented immediately. The governor claims that the policy is a by-product of cartel crossings at the border and noted that there may be more traffic disruptions from Mexico to Texas for vehicle inspections. In March 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, citing a crisis on the southern border of the United States. The operation relied on resources from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard for Border Policing. The operation at one point expanded to more than 10,000 members of the service. As Abbott has deployed thousands of personnel on the U.S.-Mexico border, the operation has been blamed openly on politics and a waste of resources by Democratic lawmakers and even some of the National Guard members involved in the mission. Other Abbott initiatives include plans to build a border wall. Bus and unsafe vehicle policies will be added to Operation Lone Star, and Abbott said more instructions will be announced next week. CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.
