Eric Adams claps back at Greg Abbott’s Post op-ed: ‘Get this man a dictionary’
Mayor Eric Adams told Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to brush up on his vocabulary Wednesday amid their ongoing war of words over the relocation of migrants from the Lone Star State to the Big Apple.
“Someone get this man a dictionary,” mayoral press secretary Fabien Levy said in a prepared statement.
“‘Hypocrisy’ is claiming you love America and then decrying the words on the Statue of Liberty.”
The broadside from City Hall came in response to a blistering Post op-ed column in which Abbott accused Adams of being all talk when it comes to New York’s status as a “sanctuary city.”
“What Adams is dealing with is a trifle of what small border towns grapple with daily,” Abbott wrote.
“Those communities have been ripped apart by cartel-infused crime that destroys ranches, invades homes and threatens the safety of Texas residents along highly trafficked areas of the border.”
In his statement, Levy said, “To be clear, Mayor Adams and New York City will continue to welcome asylum seekers with open arms.
“These individuals and families have been through hell, and they deserve more than being used as political pawns by a governor who cares about nothing more than reelection,” he said.
“Gov. Abbott should actually focus on the failures he has burdened Texans with before spending time writing op-eds in New York papers.”
Adams has said the city’s shelter system has been overloaded by a surge of more than 6,000 asylum-seeking migrants since May.
In April, Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Washington, DC, to protest what he calls President Biden’s “irresponsible open border policies” and he expanded the relocation effort to New York City earlier this month.
On Wednesday morning, five buses chartered by Abbott arrived outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan, marking the largest number to show up there in a single day.
City officials said the buses dropped off a total of 237 migrants, including a family of five with a coughing 3-month-old baby.
They were put in an ambulance so the infant could receive hospital treatment, with city Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro saying the tot was “very ill.”
A male migrant was also seen getting into an ambulance but it was unclear what was ailing him.
Migrants getting off the buses were greeted with handshakes from Assistant Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Erick Salgado, an evangelical pastor from Brooklyn whose appointment earlier this year was condemned by the New York Immigration Council over what it called his “prejudicial history of anti-LGBTQ+ views.”
