Abbott and Adams spoke with “Nightline” co-anchor Byron Pitts in interviews that aired on Wednesday, where Adams criticized the Republican governor for not coordinating the arrivals of migrants with NYC officials and Abbott doubled down on his policy to bus migrants out of Texas.
“We’ve got to secure our border because the Biden administration is not securing it,” Abbott said. “And then the reason why we began putting people on buses in the first place is because the Biden administration, they were literally dumping migrants off in small little towns of 10 or 25,000 people, and they were completely overwhelmed.”
Meanwhile, Adams criticized Abbott for not coordinating with NYC officials as buses of migrants arrived over the past two weeks.
A bus from Texas arrived in Washington, D.C. Wednesday morning, transporting dozens of illegal immigrants as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s new plan to counter federal immigration policies during an ongoing border crisis.
Abbott announced last week that he was directing the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) to transport migrants released from federal custody in Texas to the nation’s capital and other locations outside his state.
The bus pulled up at approximately 8 a.m. local time, blocks away from the U.S. Capitol building. Fox News has learned that they came from the Del Rio sector in Texas, after coming to the U.S. from Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Upon the bus’s arrival in Washington, D.C., individuals disembarked one by one except for family units who exited together. They checked in with officials and had wristbands they were wearing cut off before being told they could go.
Still, the plan won what is perhaps surprising praise from groups and politicians who are often Abbott’s adversaries. State Rep. Chris Turner, the Grand Prairie Democrat who chairs his party’s House caucus, said he and his colleagues “support many of the ideas that Gov. Abbott laid out today.” And Texas Gun Sense Vice President Ed Scruggs said the proposal represents the most movement he’s seen on gun violence issues in Texas in decades.
“We’re happy that the conversation has begun. We basically went 20 years without being able to have this discussion,” Scruggs said. “This type of leadership, even on just a few moderate issues, is important.”
Abbott’s announcement, made at the Dallas school district’s headquarters Wednesday, came one day after students at Santa Fe High School students returned to class for the first time following the deadly shootings.
At the heart of the governor’s proposal is “hardening” schools like Santa Fe as targets, both by guarding them with increased police presence and by persuading more school districts to join existing state programs for arming school staff. Abbott proposed several pages’ worth of revisions to Texas’ School Marshal Program, one of two such systems that combine to arm teachers in more than 170 of Texas’ 1,000-plus school districts.
Schools should not be required to join such programs, Abbott said, but he did propose that the state pay for training for it this summer to ease the burden on individual districts.
[…]
The governor also placed heavy emphasis on “preventing threats in advance,” largely through expanded mental health screening programs and on-campus counseling.
Abbott also proposed expanding a mental health screening program already operated through the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He said he hopes to “eventually” make that program — currently operational in 10 school districts — a statewide system, and said he recommends Texas fund it with $20 million.
The Telemedicine Wellness, Intervention, Triage, and Referral Project, which aims to identify junior high and high school students at risk of committing school violence and intervene before tragedy occurs, has already had 25 students removed from school, 44 placed in alternative schools and 38 sent to a hospital. Abbott had praised that program just hours after the shooting, tweeting that “we want to use it across the state.”
Late Thursday afternoon, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office found itself dealing with a traumatic and wholly unexpected situation.
The governor, who was on vacation with his family in Jackson Hole, Wyo., was on his way to St. John’s Hospital. He had been accidentally scalded with hot water and had extensive second- and third-degree burns on both legs below the knees and both feet.
Matt Hirsch, the governor’s communications director, began preparing a statement about the injury and how it might require the governor to curtail his schedule for the next couple of weeks, including, perhaps, skipping the Republican National Convention, which will get underway next Monday in Cleveland.
But as he was circulating a draft, the awful events began unfolding in Dallas.
Hirsch scrapped the statement.
“We didn’t want to distract from what was happening in Dallas,” he said. “We still don’t want to.”
