The man at least partially responsible for New York’s migrant crisis, Governor Abbott of Texas, used a rare appearance in the nation’s largest city Wednesday to urge his critics to direct their ire at the man he says is responsible for their situation — President Biden.

All efforts made by officials in New York to tamp down the crisis will be pointless unless they can convince the federal government to change its policies at the nation’s southern border, he said.

“The challenge that the city of New York and the state of New York are dealing with is caused by one person: Joe Biden,” the Texas governor said at the Manhattan Institute at New York City Wednesday. The advice he offers to the state leaders grappling with an overwhelmed shelter system is simple: demand from the federal government not more money, but a change in immigration policy.

Mr. Abbott’s conversation with the Institute’s president, Reihan Salam, follows the decisions of several Republican governors to transport large numbers of migrants to the cities in the interior of the country primarily run by of Democratic mayors. Texas has only sent 15,800 of the 120,000 migrants who have entered New York, Mr. Abbot said, as “the lead importer of migrants to New York is not Texas, it’s Joe Biden.”

Mr. Abbott argued, though, that cities with 8 million people are better equipped to sustain an influx of migrants than small towns near the border.

“We have to relieve our own communities from the challenges they face,” he said, adding that “the bussing process is totally voluntary. No one is ever put on a bus against their will, without identifying the location they want to go to.”

As New York City struggles to cope with the consequences of this fundamentally federal problem, local leaders are speaking out. A New York City councilwoman, Joann Ariola, testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources in Washington Wednesday against a proposed migrant camp at the former site of the city’s first airport, Floyd Bennett Field, in South Brooklyn. 

This plan to restrict local access to the park in order to house up to 2,000 migrants “flies in the face of the founding ideals of the National Park Service,” Ms. Ariola said. She admonished the agency for failing to address the fact that only two park police officers are assigned to the area surrounding the proposed camp.

“The National Park Service never consulted with our agency or our officers to collaborate on law enforcement concerns or operational implementation,” said the chairman of the United States Park Police Fraternal Order of Police, Kenneth Spencer, in his testimony. He said local forces would be unequipped to protect the area, because “our capacity to serve and protect the public today is literally bursting at the seams.”

The influx of migrants is also straining local hospitals, which are prohibited from turning away patients, and public schools, which are legally obliged to use state funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants. Mr. Abbott predicts that these issues will lead to future litigation. “Why should the state of Texas or New York have to use our state budgets to pay for a financial problem caused by the Biden administration?”

While human rights advocates and many Democrats in Congress cite the humanitarian need to house migrants, Mr. Abbott said the drug crisis afflicting the country, especially New York’s, is a result of illegal immigration. “What is inhumane is a one-year-old child dying in New York because of fentanyl,” he says. “Every state in America now is a border state. Every community is a border community.”

Suggesting that there should be bipartisan consensus on the issue, Mr. Abbott said the efforts of both Texas and New York to address illegal immigration will be ineffective until the Biden administration follows the rule of law. The governor said he is “at war with our own federal government that is interfering with Texas’s attempt to enforce the rule of law in our state.”

“The president of the United States has one primary authority — national security,” Mr. Abbott asserted. “He is endangering the United States every single day by having a porous border that is allowing people on the terrorist watch list to cross that border.”