Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX): Beto O’Rourke Has Embraced The Open Border Policies Of Joe Biden

Listen To The Full Interview Below:

Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican Governor of Texas joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss his effort to bus illegal migrants from the Texas border to democrat sanctuary cities and to talk about the state of his race against Beto O’Rourke 25 days out from election day.

Governor Abbott discussed his efforts to bus migrants to sanctuary cities saying,

“Joe Biden has never been to the border to even see the chaos that is created. So I chose to take the border to Joe Biden, and that’s when we first started bussing people to Washington, D.C. And then literally out of nowhere, the mayor of New York started complaining about me bussing people to New York, which we had not been doing. But after he kept complaining about it, I thought, Well, if he’s going to keep complaining about it, I’m going to start taking credit for it. So that’s when we started bussing them to New York City, which also is a self-identified sanctuary city.”

Abbott also slammed Beto O’Rourke over his border policies saying,

“People like Betto, who’s running from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. He cannot run because he fully embraced and supported Joe Biden for the president of the United States of America. But also equally important is that Beto O’Rourke has embraced the open border policies that Joe Biden has embraced. I actually called for a reduction in immigration enforcement.”

FULL Transcript:
GUY BENSON, FOX RADIO HOST: But we begin with another Republican governor also up for reelection, Governor Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, joining us now.

Governor, it’s great to have you back on the show.

GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R-TX): Great to be back, Guy. How you doing?

BENSON: I’m doing very well. I’ve been dying to ask you about this. I know you’ve been a little busy, right? You’ve got some stuff going on in Texas. So we’ve been covering it from a distance here for a while, but we haven’t spoken on the air really since the whole migrant busing and flying controversy blew up because you’ve been doing it for a while. We’d talked about it. I called it a stunt but one that I thought made sense, maybe a successful stunt, to force people to talk about an issue that a lot of them were simply ignoring in the Democratic Party, their friends in the mainstream media. And it seems like as the weeks and months have passed, the success of what you pioneered has become more and more evident because not only have other Republican governors gotten onboard and participated — just the anger, the impotent rage from people on the left trying to explains why what you’re doing is so awful and cruel and evil, but then, inadvertently, they’re talking about an issue that is not good for them because of their policies. And then they can’t — at least as far as I am concerned, they can’t really explain why you’re the bad guy in this as opposed to the people who are enabling this huge crisis that you’re simply giving certain jurisdictions, sanctuary cities a small taste of. Did you ever expect when you first had this thought and decided to put it into action, did you ever expect that it would, I guess, work this well in terms of shining a spotlight on the problem?

ABBOTT: Well, it all started out actually just to help out local officials on the border in Texas. I was in a meeting of sheriffs, and police chiefs, and mayors of all the local communities down there, like Eagle Pass, Del Rio, et cetera. And they were overwhelmed with the number of migrants that were being dumped off by the Biden administration. And they needed help. And so, I said, listen, I’ll take charge of this, and I’ll start relieving the pressures from you that you all are incapable of dealing with. And I’ll start busing them to sanctuary cities across the United States of America. Of course, the first option was an easy choice. And that is, the whole problem we have on the border was caused by Joe Biden, and Joe Biden has never been to the border to even see the chaos that he’s created.

BENSON: Right.

ABBOTT: And so, I chose to take the border to Joe Biden. And that’s when we first started busing people to Washington, D.C. And then literally out of nowhere the Mayor of New York started complaining about me busing people to New York, which we had not been doing. But after he kept complaining about it, I thought, well, if he’s going to keep complaining about it, I’m going to start taking credit for it.

(LAUGHTER)

And that’s when we started busing them to New York City, which also is a self-identified sanctuary city. And what’s important here, Guy, is that this is not a Texas problem that’s happening on the border, this is a problem for the United States of America, that the United States of America as a whole must deal with in response to it. And that’s exactly why New York, and Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and maybe some other locations need to be involved, so they experience the challenges that are created by these open border policies —

(CROSSTALK)

BENSON: That they support.

ABBOTT: Say again?

BENSON: Yeah, I mean, they support these policies, but they don’t want to actually grapple with the consequences of what they support.

ABBOTT: Exactly. And so, it’s pure hypocrisy on their part. So they spout all these leftist ideological agendas, like they want to have open borders, they want to have sanctuary cities, all that kind of stuff. But when they have to grapple with the realities of it, it’s not-in-my-backyard approach. And that’s exactly what the mayor of New York, and the mayor of D.C., and mayor of Chicago are saying.

(CROSSTALK)

BENSON: That’s exactly right.

ABBOTT: They have a responsibility to step up and start carrying their weight of the open border policies that have been created by Joe Biden’s policies.

BENSON: You just name-checked a couple of cities, you said there might be some others. Do you have other destinations in mind that you’re exploring?

ABBOTT: So we will explore options. We know that New York, and Chicago, and other places are getting overrun. You may have seen that Mayor Adams is asking for $1 billion —

BENSON: Right (ph).

ABBOTT: — to be able to deal with just a few thousand migrants. Listen, we get as many in a day as he may get, you know, the entire time. And so, it’s just astounding, they think they need $1 billion to deal with this, but it shows the magnitude of the problem that’s created by the Biden administration. One interesting thing is, it’s my understanding, that both the governors of New York and Illinois have asked the White House to get more engaged with coming up with solutions for the border, which was one of the knock-on effects of what we did. Listen, we — let’s go back two and a half years, under President Trump we had the fewest border crossings two and a half years ago than we had in four decades. And now we have the highest number of illegal border crossings ever. There’s more than 2.2 million people that came across just this past year. Now, that is almost the size of Houston, Texas in one single year. This is something that Texas cannot handle, something the United States cannot handle.

BENSON: Well, it’s way more than double the entire population of Delaware, the president’s home state, just to put that in perspective. In fact, the number of known got-aways since Biden took office exceeds the population of his entire home state. And I just want to focus in on something that you just mentioned. Some of the comments from these leaders, from these mayors — very angry at you. It seems like Mayor Lightfoot spends a lot of time coming after you, questioning if you’re a Christian, saying it’s very cruel and non-Christian to bus these people to our sanctuary city. Then she put them immediately on buses and sent them off to the suburbs, which was sort of interesting. But you had officials in Washington, D.C. saying well, they’re trying to turn us into a border town. Like, we can’t deal with this, we’re not a border town. Mayor Adams in New York said Texas should deal with this, let them deal with the housing, we didn’t ask for this. I sometimes sit here and marvel that they are reading these — or at least making these comments that it’s almost as if they were written down by you, begging them to say these things, and then they go and they say these things. Maybe they don’t understand that they are precisely making the point that you were trying to make, and they’re doing it for you in the context of attacking you, which number one, only fuels the national attention on a problem that needs a lot of attention and fixing. Number two, probably can’t hurt that much politically back home in Texas to have blue-city mayors mad at you because the people of Texas should be the ones who shoulder all of this, certainly not the enlightened progressives in New York and elsewhere.

ABBOTT: Oh, you’re spot on, and you know, you hear New York and Chicago say that they can’t handle this. Listen, they’re, what, 100 times the size of Eagle Pass, Texas. Talk about a community that cannot handle it is Eagle Pass, Texas or Del Rio, Texas that don’t have the ability to deal with these thousands of migrants who are coming across every single day. New York actually does have the capability far better than some small town in the state of Texas does. And they did as for (ph) in New York by itself declaring themselves as a sanctuary city. But candidly, the thing that the mayor said in New York that said the best, he actually said that he was going to try to get a bunch of New Yorkers to come down to Texas and knock on doors in Texas to campaign against me. And I said, bring it (ph). I can’t wait for them to show up in Tyler, Texas or Midland, Texas, or wherever the case may be and see how New Yorkers will be greeted by someone in our community from New York trying to tell us who to elect for governor in the Lone Star State.

BENSON: Well, I mean, it kind of makes sense, though. I mean, all these New Yorkers are donating to your opponent. They should come down and knock doors, too. Why not? I mean, you know, if they’re really all in for Beto, let’s get New Yorkers for Beto down on the ground in the Lone Star State and see how that goes. Let’s talk about the race that you’re in right now, Governor. You mentioned President Biden has not been to the border. I think the White House admitted last year that the last time Joe Biden was really anywhere near the southern border was in 2008, so he hasn’t been there since he was even vice president, let alone president, as he presides over this historic crisis that you’ve already outlined. The person that he delegated — I mean, he has the DHS Secretary who we had a story here at Fox this week that he knew that the whipping smear against border patrol agents was untrue. He participated in it anyway. That’s one of the deputies on the border crisis in the Biden administration. The other, of course, is the vice president named border czar by President Biden. She was just in Texas last weekend. She paid your state a visit. She went to Austin. She did an abortion event, and she did a fundraiser. And it’s interesting. I didn’t see your opponent anywhere near her when she was in town when, of course, she didn’t go down to the border when she had the opportunity. I find all of that rather interesting. I’d imagine you might, too.

ABBOTT: Well, of course, they were trying to run. And they, being people like Beto, are trying to run and hide as much as possible from the Biden administration, from Joe Biden himself, from Kamala Harris, but the amazing thing about Kamala Harris is she was also on a talk show this week saying that I was in dereliction of my duty by busing these migrants to these cities. Listen, the people who are in dereliction of their duty are the president and the vice president themselves, but also people like Beto who’s running from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. He cannot run because he fully embraced and supported Joe Biden for the President of the United States of America, but also equally important is Beto O’Rourke has embraced the open-border policies that Joe Biden has embraced. He actually called for a reduction in immigration enforcement. He said, quote, “There’s no problem on the border.” He also said that he wanted to provide legal status to 95 percent of those who are coming across the border illegally. So Beto O’Rourke would do nothing more than fully embrace and be a part of Joe Biden’s open border policy.

BENSON: Oh my gosh, like can you imagine just — I think it’s unlikely — but Beto O’Rourke as Governor of Texas and Joe Biden as president? You look at the crisis as it is right now where there’s already these horrible incentives to have people come across the border illegally. If you get rid of one of the only officials at the border, you, that’s actually trying to do something about and fight back against it, against this huge tide, you have someone else who’s basically embracing the Biden policy as the Governor of Texas. I — you almost can’t even fathom how bad it would get. I don’t think — as I said, it’s terribly likely to happen. The polling shows you, Governor, have 4 to 10 points is what I’m seeing in a lot of these surveys. Last question, how are you feeling about the race? Obviously, you — the data looks pretty good for you. You might want to be confident but not overconfident. How are you trying to make sure that Texans show up and vote, and treat this election like it — you know, it really matters? And it might be close, even as it seems like you’re pulling away a little bit?

ABBOTT: Well, so, you know (ph) we are able to turnout our voters, we’re going to win. But what threatens that is the fact that, kind of as you suggested earlier, Beto is getting most of his money from outside the state of Texas, including $1.5 million from George Soros who supports Beto’s open border policies and defund the police policies. And because people from California, New York, and Illinois and other states are funneling money — and including dark money to Beto O’Rourke, it’s going to make their race closer than it should be. And that’s why we’re working overtime to make sure that all Republicans in Texas, all independents in Texas who do not want to see open borders, who do not want to see police defunded, they need to get out and vote for me and make sure that I get reelected.

BENSON: Greg Abbott is the Governor of Texas, a Republican up for reelection against Mr. O’Rourke, we talk about that race fairly frequently here. And governor, if we don’t chat with you between now and November 8, good luck and I hope to have you back as the freshly, newly reelected governor of Texas sometime very soon.

ABBOTT: Look forward to it. Take care.

BENSON: Greg Abbott on The Guy Benson Show. What a start to this Friday program. Much more to get to, including the governor of this state where I’m broadcasting this week Brian Kemp in Georgia. It’s all ahead, stay tuned.