Wikimdia Commons / Gage Skidmore
"If we can put pressure on all these Democrat mayors around the country, maybe they'll pick up the phone and call Joe Biden and say, 'the border is not secure,'" Patrick said during the Fox News interview on Monday.
"Every mayor of a big, blue city, which are most of the top 25 in the country, should be on notice," the Republican told Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer. "Look out your window. You might see a bus coming to you one day in the future, and the buses are going to keep coming."
Patrick's threat comes after Abbott recently expanded his controversial busing program, which takes asylum seekers from South Texas and drops them off in big East Coast cities.
The initiative first targeted Washington, D.C., busing more than 6,100 migrants to the nation's capital since April to bolster the Republican governor's claim that the Biden administration isn't doing enough to deter illegal immigration. This month, Abbott expanded the effort to include New York City, wreaking havoc on the city's homeless shelters and stretching at its resources.
Last week, the New York Post reported that some migrants arriving in the Big Apple were severely ill with COVID-19 and would likely need to be hospitalized. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has also blamed Abbott for creating a humanitarian crisis in her city.
"If we can put pressure on all these Democrat mayors around the country, maybe they'll pick up the phone and call Joe Biden and say, 'The border is not secure,'" Patrick told Fox in defense of the bus trips.
Abbott has made border security the centerpiece of his 2022 reelection campaign, repeatedly claiming that the Biden administration has thrown open the gates to illegal border crossers.
Even so, a recent New York Times analysis poked holes in that narrative, estimating that at the current rate, immigration officials are likely to apprehend more than 2 million border crossers by the end of the 2022 fiscal year, surpassing the 1.73 million apprehended the year prior.
"Texas will keep sending buses of migrants to NYC, and I support sending migrants to other big Democrat-led cities," Patrick, who's also up for reelection in 2022, wrote in a tweet following the Monday interview. "The Democrats are squarely responsible for the crisis on our southern border. Until Democrat governors and mayors speak up, they share the blame with Joe and Kamala."
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