Opinion | Migrant Busing Brings the Border Crisis to Sanctuary Cities

It was 6 a.m., and the buses from Texas had yet to arrive. But a handful of ambulances and policemen already waited on the street. An hour later, empty buses from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would line up to transport migrants across New York City. Volunteers unloaded boxes into the makeshift “triage center” inside the lobby of the Port Authority bus terminal. Manuel Castro, Mayor Eric Adams’s commissioner for immigrant affairs, and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district spans Upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx, arrived before 7. At around 8, 80 asylum-seeking migrants filed out of the two buses arriving from the Lone Star State, one sent by Mr. Abbott from the border and another by the city of El Paso. Messrs. Castro and Espaillat shook everyone’s hand, saying: “Bienvenidos a Nueva York.”

Since early August, Gov. Greg Abbott has been sending bus loads of asylum-seekers from the Texas border to sanctuary cities—New York, Chicago, Washington and other places that have policies discouraging local law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities in enforcing immigration law. This week Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis one-upped Mr. Abbott by sending a small plane full of Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.