New York City is buying tickets for thousands of migrants to travel to Texas via bus or plane, from where many of them originally traveled to the sanctuary city in the first place, amid an ongoing battle between officials over how to handle the migrant crisis.

New York City, which has been overwhelmed by more than 200,000 migrant arrivals since 2022, has been providing settlement options to migrants since that time. Last year, it opened a reticketing center to offer one-way plane tickets to migrants.

Fox News confirms that 4,500 migrants have been sent to Texas using bus or plane tickets bought by the city. The figure was first reported by Bloomberg News.

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According to Mayor Eric Adams’ office, the top five destinations for migrants leaving the Big Apple are Texas, Illinois, Florida, New York State and Colorado.

In total, they have issued more than 47,000 tickets and roughly 4,500, have gone to Texas. It was not clear how many of those migrants had come from buses sent to NYC from Texas. 

Between February and July there were 2,297 tickets purchased to Texas, with the top three cities being Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Fox is told that spending through to July 2024 on reticketing has been $13.8 million. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began bussing migrants to New York City and other sanctuary cities in 2022 in what he said was an effort to relieve pressure on the overwhelmed border communities. He chose sanctuary cities – cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement – because he said they encouraged the crisis. An NYC spokesperson told Fox that the influx was exacerbated by Abbott and that resources have been exhausted in part due to his efforts.

When asked how the program works, a spokesperson said, “Whenever they have a desire where they want to go back to somewhere else, we buy their tickets. It is mostly planes, but we also buy bus tickets.”

Abbott’s office slammed the handling of the crisis by the Biden administration and accused Adams of hypocrisy.

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“Border Czar Kamala Harris and the federal government continues to refuse to enforce federal immigration laws already on the books and do their jobs to secure the border, allowing record-high levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and weapons to surge into our state and country,” spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris told Fox News in a statement.

“Hypocritical Mayor Adams said busing migrants is ‘morally bankrupt,’ while Harris called transporting migrants ‘political theater’ and they’re doing the same thing themselves. Until Border Czar Harris steps up and does her job to secure the border, Texas will continue utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to the Biden-Harris border crisis,” he said.

New York City has struggled with the influx of migrants, which has put a strain on social services and led to scenes of migrants lining up outside the Roosevelt Hotel.

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Spending on the migrant crisis is expected to exceed $5 billion, and Adams has previously said costs could balloon to over $10 billion by the end of next fiscal year. Previous estimates had put that number even higher.

At the peak of the crisis, the city was taking in an average of 4,000 migrants per week. But that dropped into the hundreds in recent months as the crisis at the border abated after a presidential proclamation from President Biden that limited asylum claims. 

Recently, the city announced it would be closing a massive tent shelter on Randall’s Island. Officials said the number of asylum seekers in shelters has dropped for 14 straight weeks and is now at the lowest point in over a year.

“We’re not out of the woods yet, but make no mistake, thanks in large part to our smart management strategies and successful advocacy, we have turned the corner on this crisis,” Adams said in a statement this month. “We’re not scrambling every day to open new shelters. We’re talking about closing them. We’re not talking about how much we’re spending. We’re talking about how much we’ve saved.”