Approx 4 million illegal migrants have been caught at the border and let in (awaiting trial). That doesn't include the folks who weren't caught. Chicago and NYC represent about 250,000 of these. Boo hoo...of course nobody in the Dem party is ready to turn people away at the border like Mr. Mean did.
Nor has at any time in US history illegals been put up in hotels or received the kind of ridiculous financial bonanza their receive at the expensive of this nation's poor (who are legal residents).
So my advice to the Mayors of NYC and Chicago is to shut the f-ck up unless you're prepared to do what's necessary at the border. Of course you won't. So strap in the fun is just beginning.
Surge of Migrants Heading North Has Chicago, New York at a ‘Breaking Point’
Leaders in cities say they need more federal help to house increased numbers
By Joe Barrett in Chicago, Erin Ailworth in New York and Alicia A. Caldwell in Los Angeles, WSJ
Dec. 30, 2023 9:01 am ET
The mayors of New York, Chicago and Denver said a nonending flow of migrants arriving from the southern border has pushed their cities to the breaking point heading into the New Year, as border crossings swell and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott keeps finding new ways to torment his Democratic rivals.
Abbott, a Republican who began sending migrants on buses to other states in spring 2022, doubled down on the strategy in recent weeks. He sent his first planeloads of migrants to Chicago and New York in part to flout regulations on where and when bus operators can drop off the migrants.
After Chicago imposed new busing rules in November, New York Mayor Eric Adams adopted similar regulations on Wednesday. Adams made his move after a Texas-chartered plane was diverted to Philadelphia because of fog, and the migrants were then sent to New York on five buses that arrived at about 1 a.m. on Wednesday. The city recently faced a record 14 buses arriving on a single day, he said.
“New York City has begun to see another surge of migrants arriving, and we expect this to intensify over the coming days as a result of Texas Gov. Abbott’s cruel and inhumane politics,” Adams said.
Adams denounced the moves in a joint virtual press conference with the mayors of Chicago and Denver in which they called for the federal government to declare an emergency and provide more help to manage the crisis.
A spokesperson for the Texas governor called the new rules hypocritical and an effort for the cities to skirt their own sanctuary-city principles. “Instead of attacking Texas’ efforts to provide relief to our overwhelmed border communities, these Democrat mayors should call on their party leader to finally do his job and secure the border—something he continues refusing to do,” said Renae Eze.
Around 161,000 migrants have come through New York City’s intake system since spring 2022. That figure includes people who made it on their own as well as those who were provided free rides, according to city officials. Some 68,000 are in city care, split between bricks-and-mortar shelter facilities and tent complexes, such as one set up on a sports field at Randall’s Island.
“For many months, we were able to keep the visualization of this crisis from hitting our streets, but we have reached a breaking point and can no longer do that,” Adams said Wednesday, adding that the crisis is costing the city about $5 billion this fiscal year and is beginning to cut into other services.
In Chicago, nearly 31,000 people have arrived by chartered bus or were sent on airplanes by relief groups from the border since August 2022, according to city data. While many people at a time have slept on the floors of Chicago police stations, the city has recently moved all but a handful into shelters, where nearly 15,000 migrants are currently housed.
“We have reached a critical point in this mission that, absent real, significant intervention immediately, our local economies were not designed and built to respond to,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said. “We are literally building the system as we go along.”
Border Patrol agents made more than 10,000 arrests a day on several days in December, and there is little expectation that the volume of arriving migrants will slow in the coming days. While Congress is debating a package that could tighten border security, the cities are still bracing for more arrivals in 2024.
Hundreds of migrants have walked through gaps in border fencing in Lukeville, Ariz., and turned themselves in.
The new rules in Chicago have prompted some bus drivers to drop off migrants in surrounding suburbs to avoid penalties that were stepped up in December. “They are literally dropping families off in the middle of nowhere,” Johnson said.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said the cities were calling on the federal government to provide more funding, coordinate where arrivals are sent so no one city is overwhelmed and expand work permits to more of the arrivals so they can begin to pay their own way.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have said they can do little to stop the latest surge, blamed in part on weakened enforcement in Mexico and the Biden administration’s inability to swiftly remove or apply other consequences to most arriving migrants.
Johannes Favi, deputy director of the Illinois Community for Displaced Immigrants, said a delegation from his group was in El Paso, Texas, a few weeks ago and heard there were several migrant caravans heading to the border. Those are the people now swelling numbers entering border states and starting to head to northern cities.
“It’s just gonna keep going up,” he said of arrivals in Chicago.
For many migrants, the busing programs offer a quick and free ride away from the border, particularly for those who didn’t have a final destination in mind. El Paso officials have said as many as half of recently arrived Venezuelan migrants were single adults with no specific destinations. Unlike many previous groups of migrants, who had family members or friends already living in U.S. cities who could help them get settled and find jobs, these arrivals have little or no support in cities where they end up.
Wilfredo José Vasquez, 26 years old, and his wife, Andrea Mendez, 21, are among them. They arrived at the U.S. border in Texas in late November, after spending months walking from their native Venezuela, with their 3-year-old son, Eros, in tow.
Back home, they could afford only one meal a day on Vasquez’s pay as a cook, Vasquez said.
In Texas, they had no relatives or even a plan for where to go, so they were sent to Chicago by bus, the couple said.
After a few hours at a police station, they were transferred to a shelter in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, where there is plenty to eat, but little personal space and lots of arguing that makes it hard to sleep, they said. “But it’s so much better than sleeping in the streets,” Mendez said.
The migrant crisis is causing political, legal and logistical headaches for leaders in New York and Chicago. They have faced pushback on plans for shelters and pressure to lessen the scope of the sanctuary they offer, as well as complaints from advocates for immigrants that they haven’t done enough.
In recent weeks, Johnson’s allies on Chicago’s City Council fought off an effort to put a nonbinding measure on the March ballot asking voters whether the city should end or curtail its sanctuary city status. After the city spent months trying to put up a tent city on a former industrial site, state leaders pulled the plug on the project out of concern that the site was too polluted to safely house people.
Officials in both cities have begun notifying migrants in city care that they have to leave after 60 days. While people can reapply for a city-funded bed after the time is up, advocates for immigrants said the policy was cruel and unnecessarily disruptive.
Construction of a Chicago migrant tent facility was halted in December.
One of the biggest reasons people often languish in shelters is that they lack a legal means of working, and either don’t know how to obtain a permit or don’t have the resources to make it through the process.
But centers in both cities, meant to help qualified migrants get through different programs, are starting to show progress.
New York has helped migrants file 23,000 work authorization, Temporary Protected Status and asylum applications, Adams said Wednesday.
In Chicago, a program launched as a pilot in November is now processing work authorization applications for 100 to 200 people a day four days a week, said Ere Rendon, vice president of immigrant justice for the Resurrection Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit that is coordinating the effort that includes city, state and federal support.
Federal officials begin processing the applications on site. “They take pictures and fingerprints of everybody applying and have turned around work permits incredibly fast, faster than I’ve ever seen before,” she said.
Rendon said that about 1,500 people had applied so far and that many of them had already received their work permits, with a processing time of one to four weeks. She said the group expects to beat a goal of submitting applications for everyone in shelters who qualifies by the end of February and then move on to people outside the shelters.
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