LA mayor 'fearful' Texas will send planes of illegal immigrants to 'sanctuary city'

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has expressed concern over the possibility that Texas governor Greg Abbott may soon send planes full of illegal migrants to that sanctuary city in California. He recently shuttled busloads of people from the southern border to the California metropolis, a move that Bass called "evil."

Speaking at an Axios event in LA on Thursday, Bass made it clear that while the City of Angels welcomes immigrants, she disapproves of the way Republican border state governors are going about sending them there. 

When asked whether the Biden administration should do more to help sanctuary cities Bass said "absolutely," pointing out how New York has struggled to deal with the massive influx of people. New York's Eric Adams has said that the additional 10,000 people who are arriving in the city each month, without resources, income, or support, are going to "destroy" the city.

"We live in a city that welcomes immigrants," Bass said, "and so I think we have been able to handle it, but I am fearful that any day, planes could start coming."

Bass said it was "despicable" that Abbott had decided to send 12 buses of migrants from Texas to LA as the latter was threatened with a hurricane last month, and questioned why he hadn't called her to coordinate their arrival. Texas bears a huge brunt of the burden of illegal immigration, with hundreds of thousands of people pouring in month after month.

"What they're trying to do is destabilize cities," Bass said, noting that migrants had been sent to Chicago, Washington, New York, and LA. "It's the narrative that these are Democratic-run cities, and that we don't know how to govern, and that everything is chaotic here. This is just setting the stage for the presidential election next year." Texas and other border states have been dealing with the fall out of Biden's lax border policies for years.

As the Associated Press reports, Abbott has previously defended his decision to move migrants out of Texas to places further north by reminding critics that the cities in question declared themselves to be sanctuaries for such people.