Do they care what they say any more?

When Texas Gov. Abbott first started threatening to ship illegal immigrants to blue strongholds, my concerns were only two: I don't want my own allies to join in the ongoing use individual immigrants as pawns in political theater, and I don't want to hear empty threats. The White House inadvertently made an almost valid point by observing that Texas has no authority to lock anyone up on a bus for transport.

This week Abbott resolved both concerns by following through, and by bussing only consenting immigrants to D.C. The White House rather adroitly, if not very credibly, took the line that they were pleased as punch. “So it’s nice the state of Texas is helping them get to their final destination as they await the outcomes of their immigration proceedings,” press secretary Jen Psaki said. The White House got several local communities to make public statements about how thrilled they were to welcome their new neighbors. These protestations may conceivably have been genuine; I wouldn't mind welcoming some immigrant families in my own neighborhood, as long as we were too overwhelmed by numbers and everyone understood that the goal was to assimilate, get employed, and stay off welfare. It was perhaps a little embarrassing to the D.C. spokesmen that the bus was full of single men, not families, but hey. They can meet nice girls here.

Today, however, the Department of Homeland Security showed that it hadn't been read in on the routine. Chris Magnus, head of Customs and Border Protection, complained that Texas can't just be bussing illegal immigrants to distant communities and dropping them off without asking first--that's the feds' job. Abbott was "hurting the government’s efforts to coordinate how the migrants are released." Abbott was "taking actions to move migrants without adequately coordinating with the federal government and local border communities"--again, exclusively the feds' prerogative. He objected that Texas was "interfering with those immigration proceedings by moving the migrants around to places the government may not be able to track"--like the nation's capital? I suppose Mr. Magnus will get some help revising and extending his remarks today.