New York City has spent over $12 billion in three years to shelter migrants: Report
Republican Joseph Borelli of Staten Island said that the city will spend $6.1 billion in the 2024 fiscal for illegal immigrants.
New York City is paying a huge amount for both the Biden administration’s border crisis and the city’s own anti-ICE policies, a bill footed by the taxpayers. According to a report in conservative Washington-based news outlet The Washington Examiner the city will spend $12 billion in nearly three years in response to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that the sanctuary city hosts.
Republican Joseph Borelli of Staten Island, a minority leader of the New York City council told the House Homeland Security Committee that city will spend $6.1 billion in the 2024 fiscal for illegal immigrants.
He said at a hearing: “Adding the approximately $1.5 billion we have already spent, [the] total projected cost of sheltering migrants in New York City will exceed $12 billion over three fiscal years. To put that in perspective, over the next year alone, we will spend enough money to cover the entire budget of Dallas, Texas, meaning the cost of sheltering migrants in New York City, taxpayers could pay to man every firehouse, police station, pick up the garbage, maintain the water and sewers, inspect the buildings, run the airport, and even cut the grass in Dallas parks, a city of 1.3 million people.”
Since Joe Biden took office in early 2021, the Border Patrol agents have apprehended roughly six million who entered illegally through Mexico, of which 2 million were ultimately released to the US and allowed to travel into the country. Borelli claimed that 125,000 illegal immigrants arrived in the city and requested assistance since 2021. Around 15,000 of them were bused to New York City from Texas.
The city of New York has set up 200 shelters across five boroughs, which has led to protests. Borelli added: "The city expects to shelter over 78,000 individuals in the current fiscal year at a cost of $4.7 billion. By next fiscal year, assuming no action is taken by the federal government and New York doesn't amend its own policies, the city anticipates the average daily number of migrants and shelters would be more than 100,000, at a cost of $6.1 billion."
The Biden administration had clashes with local Democratic leaders in late August over claims that the Federal government had failed to help the sanctuary zone respond to its immigrant crisis, despite receiving $100 million in aid from Congress in June.
Interestingly, residents of the Big Apple are overwhelmingly in favor of immigration to the US, and a new poll from the Siena College Research Institute found that majority of New York residents want the federal government to make it easier for migrants to obtain documents to procure work and also want migrants housed on federal property rather than private hotels or city shelters.
