Texas politicians slammed the Biden administration for flying in migrants from hard-hit California — with as many as 600 a week getting dumped in the Lone Star State, The Post has learned.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith said Texas is just getting punished after the state went to great lengths to successfully crack down on illegal crossings.
“It’s frustrating as a Texan that California, which refuses to work with us … is causing and allowing people to fly into California, and then that’s resulting in them having to then ship people to Texas when we’ve been inundated now for years,” Roy told The Post.
The estimated $80,000-a-pop commercial flights take off from Cali four times a week and are bound for Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, The Post exclusively reported this week.
As many as 150 migrants are aboard each flight, a Customs and Border Protection official said.
When the migrants are flown, they’re processed by border agents for removal, but if they have a credible fear or have some other possible exemption to Biden’s latest border rule, they’re typically handed over to ICE, sources said.
If ICE doesn’t have space, which it often doesn’t, they’ll release the migrants.
CBP says that it’s “using its resources to transfer migrants subject” to new rules restricting asylum “in order to expeditiously remove them from the country” and “not so they can be released.”
The costly, taxpayer-funded measure is meant to help relieve the pressure on San Diego, where migrant holding facilities remain over their operational capacities.
“It’s offensive as a Texan,” said Roy. “We’ve been dealing with the brunt of this for three and a half years and all prior, and now you got California all too happy to basically go along with the Biden administration’s failures and then leave us holding the bag and now they want to send us even more.”
In the end, the federal government is “stacking the deck against Texas,” Smith told The Post.
“The deterrence that Texas is implementing is working at the river on the border they don’t want to cross here, so what they’re doing is basically certain the federal government’s allowing them to circumvent that deterrence in crossing California or routing them by federal taxpayer dollars back into Texas, and they bypass that,” he explained.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Texas has increased measures including adding more soldiers to certain hard-hit regions, erecting razor wire and arming law enforcement with non-lethal pepper ball guns, measures that have been followed by a dramatic drop in illegal crossings.
When Texas troops overtook Shelby Park in Eagle Pass in the springtime, migrant crossings dropped dramatically from between 2,000 and 3,000 per day to around five, according to Texas’ Department of Public Safety (DPS).
A Texas source told The Post that migrant crossings have slowed to a trickle with only a couple hundred migrants entering the state illegally per week.
Many of the migrants are being returned to Mexico under the Biden administration’s latest policy that limits access to the asylum system when illegal crossings remain high.
However, some are still being released into Texas if they meet certain exceptions to the rule — such as having a legitimate claim of fear of returning or their home country doesn’t accept removals from the US.
During the first month of that policy going into effect, border agents released roughly 400 migrants into the Rio Grande Valley, according to leaked data obtained by The Post.
Then migrants started going west, and, in April, San Diego became the number one spot for illegal crossings for the first time in 20 years, recording more than 37,000 illegal crossings, according to NewsNation.