The migrant crisis that has rocked New York and Chicago and other big sanctuary cities has jumped its traces. Now, in a new development, small cities and towns across America are being inundated with migrants being bused from the southern border and impacting local law enforcement and city services. 

The White House and President Biden have called the busing of migrants — primarily orchestrated by Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott — immoral and unproductive, but the administration has so far failed to provide adequate resources to help localities and also to stanch the flow of migrants into Texas and other border states. 

State lawmakers who represent the small city of Whitewater, Wisconsin, took to X — formerly Twitter — to ask the president for help after migrants began moving into the area. The four lawmakers, all of whom are Republicans, sent their letter to Mr. Biden on January 5 to plead for help as the migrants add “strain on law enforcement and other local municipal services.”

“The City of Whitewater, located in Walworth County, has a population of approximately 15,000 people,” wrote state representatives Ellen Schutt, Tyler August and Scott Johnson, along with state senator Steve Nass. “According to the City of Whitewater Police Department, 800 – 1,000 immigrants have relocated to the city since early 2022.”

The lawmakers say that the migrants are of varying legal backgrounds, including those “seeking asylum, illegal aliens awaiting a federal court date and refugees.” They say that some of the migrants are responsible for a spike in violent crimes, including sexual assault, the sexual abuse of a child, a kidnapping, and the death of an infant. 

The number of migrant encounters and releases at the border are staggering. According to a January 5 report from the Department of Homeland Security, the number of migrant encounters at the border steadily increased to more than 250,000 in December 2023 — up from more than 157,000 in January last year. 

President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, once said that even 1,000 migrant encounters at the border per day would “overwhelm” the system. Just last month, the border patrol encountered an average of more than 8,000 daily. 

In the last two fiscal years, 2022 and 2023, the border patrol encountered nearly 5 million migrants at the border and expelled just over 1.5 million. According to the DHS data, border patrol directly released more than 2 million migrants into the interior of the country. 

The city of Whitewater voted by relatively narrow margins for President Trump in the last election, but the crisis does not discriminate on the basis of partisanship. Edison, New Jersey — a suburban township Mr. Biden won overwhelmingly in 2020 — is also being inundated with migrants being bused from the southern border. The town’s Democratic mayor, Sam Joshi, wants to quickly send those migrants back.

“Edison does not have the ability or the financial means to support migrants, and I can’t be any more clear that I am the son of immigrants,” Mr. Joshi told Good Day New York on January 3. 

The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who has been sending migrants via bus to New York City, recently directed his state’s law enforcement to ship the migrants to suburban New Jersey so that they could then travel by rail into America’s largest city. That came after Mayor Adams restricted Texas charter bus entrances into his city. 

“We don’t have the means to address them … [this is] squarely a federal national issue,” Mr. Joshi said of the migrants. “It should not fall on the laps of myself as mayor or any mayor.” Trenton, New Jersey’s mayor, Reed Gusciora, echoed those sentiments. “We empathize when someone is trying to seek asylum or when someone is trying to take them in,” he told Fox 5. “But we don’t have the capacity to take them in.”

Even border towns that are accustomed to migrant crossings have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of those seeking asylum. In Arizona, a small point of entry in the town of Lukeville had to be shut down after agents were overwhelmed by the thousands of migrants who were crossing every day. The crossing is used often by Arizonans to travel to Mexican beaches located just over an hour from the border. 

Lukeville was eventually reopened on January 4, but only after small businesses located in town lost tens of thousands of dollars in revenue due to lack of tourism. 
Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, blamed the Biden administration, in part, for the Lukeville closing.

“Yet again, the federal government is refusing to do its job to secure our border and keep our communities safe,” Ms. Hobbs said in a statement. “Arizona needs resources and manpower to reopen the Lukeville crossing, manage the flow of migrants, and maintain a secure, orderly and humane border. Despite continued requests for assistance, the Biden administration has refused to deliver desperately needed resources to Arizona’s border.”