Planes, trains, and automobiles — Governor Abbott will do nearly anything to send migrants from his state of Texas to Democrat-controlled states and cities amid a surge in illegal crossings at the border this week.

Texas went wheels-up this week on a new strategy of chartering private planes to ferry migrants to Chicago. The effort expands upon the state’s ongoing mission of redirecting asylum seekers to cities across the country with the aim of alleviating what Mr. Abbott calls the “Biden-made crisis” at the border. While Mayor Johnson of Chicago has accused Mr. Abbott of sowing “chaos” throughout the country, the airplane operation is taking off.  

The first flight departed El Paso Tuesday afternoon and arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport later in the day with more than 120 passengers. Footage shows parents walking hand-in-hand with their children and others collecting their personal belongings as a line of migrant families boarded the plane. “Migrants willingly choose to go to sanctuary cities,” Mr. Abbott’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, tells the Sun, “having signed a voluntary consent waiver available in multiple languages upon boarding that they agreed on the destination.” 

The operation is going airborne amid blows to Texas’s migrant bussing strategy. Chicago has filed more than 50 lawsuits against the bus companies that were shuttling illegal immigrants, which Mr. Johnson said will overburden the city as it grapples with unemployment, homelessness, and mental health crises. Mr. Abbott, he said in a speech Monday, “is attacking our country.” 

The buses began hitting the road in April of 2022 “to provide support to our overrun and overwhelmed border communities as the Biden Administration leaves thousands of migrants in their towns,” says Mr. Mahaleris. His office said this week that the state has bussed more than 82,900 migrants to cities, including New York City, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and Los Angeles, providing “vital relief” to towns on the border. 

“Because Mayor Johnson is failing to live up to his city’s ‘Welcoming City’ ordinance by targeting migrant buses from Texas, we are expanding our operation to include flights to Chicago, like the Biden Administration has been doing across the country,” Mr. Mahaleris says. President Biden had already been flying migrants from Texas to New York, sometimes in the middle of the night, in what was seen as an effort to covertly redistribute them across the country. 

Mr. Abbott’s new efforts mirror those taken by Governor DeSantis in June when he ferried South American asylum seekers around the country on chartered aircraft in a transportation program that became known as “Air DeSantis.” Dozens of Venezuelan migrants were flown from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, bringing the migrant crisis to the doorsteps of Northeastern Democrats. 

Just as Mr. DeSantis’s program was criticized as a political maneuver, so too have Mr. Abbott’s attempts to quell the crisis met outrage. Texas was sharply criticized for passing one of the strictest state immigration enforcement laws in the country, one that allows for the arrests of immigrants suspected of crossing the border illegally. Immigrant rights groups have sued the state to block the law, and the White House is not happy about it. 

“This is an extreme law,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a press briefing, “that will not and does not make the communities in Texas safer.” She added that it reflects Republicans’ tendency to “demonize immigrants and also dehumanize immigrants.”

Some Republican governors, however, argue that disciplinary action is necessary to relieve the burden of an influx of migrants into their border states and to showcase to the rest of the country how much the crisis has escalated. 

In the last 24 hours, more than 11,000 migrant encounters have taken place at the Southern border, Fox News reports. That number is up from the average of 10,000 encounters a day since December 1st, totaling more than 200,000 so far this month. “Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border,” Mr. Mahaleris says, “Texas will continue taking historic action to help our local partners respond to this Biden-made crisis.”