The city’s commissioner of immigrant affairs, Manuel Castro, was there to personally welcome 52 people off the bus, of whom 80 percent were single men, witnesses said.
“Many other people who are here have told us that the families who have boarded the buses in Texas don’t want to go to New York City,” Castro claimed, echoing Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser’s unsubstantiated claim that illegal border crossers are being forced onto buses against their will.
According to a reporter from the Daily Caller, migrants getting off a recent bus at Union Station in Washington “told me that the entire process was voluntary.”
“We anticipate that Texas and Arizona will continue to bus migrants to D.C. indefinitely,” said Norton. She wants as many of them out of her city—and into someone else’s—as federal money will pay for, also indefinitely.
There’s no mention of indigent immigrants, legal or illegal, yet that is the fund being used to feed, house, and arrange travel for D.C.’s bus-borne arrivals.
As much as Adams and his team would like to paint the arriving migrants as desperate and ill-treated, exiting passengers seem well-dressed and supplied.
Gary Jenkins, commissioner of New York City’s Department of Social Services, bragged of the “Pampers, milk, formula, food for the families” and Metro cards the city provided, but said one family’s response to free transport was, “No, I’d rather take an Uber.”
Adams claims that 4,000 migrants have come to New York from the border, filling homeless shelters intended for locals. However, Texas authorities say they have sent only 360 to New York, but almost 7,000 to Washington, D.C.
Racine has set aside a total $150,000 in grants—up to $50,000 each to nongovernmental organizations and charities—to service arriving supposed “asylum seekers.”
At roughly $21 a head, Racine’s total grants might be enough for one day’s food per migrant. Even assuming that 85 percent of them move on quickly to other U.S. locations, that leaves a number of new indigents on the D.C. taxpayers’ dime.
In announcing the grants, Racine touted the partisan efforts of his Office of the Attorney General to undermine federal immigration law, including his joining a legal challenge to the Trump administration in favor of “sanctuary” cities and refusing to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement.
The hypocrisy of big, blue city officials like Adams, Bowser, and Racine is appalling. They brag of being “sanctuary” cities, yet are incensed that some of the 2 million or so illegal aliens who have arrived in the United States on President Joe Biden’s watch should want to take them up on their generosity.
Bowser has said publicly that “local taxpayers are not picking up the tab. They should not pick up the tab .... We really need a coordinated federal response.”
However, the coordinated federal effort right now is behind getting as many migrants off the border and into the country’s interior as fast—and with as little publicity—as possible. Abbott’s and Ducey’s busing of willing volunteers is just shedding inconvenient light on the national disgrace of abandoned immigration enforcement.
Both local Democratic elected officials such as Bowser and Adams, and the Biden administration, seem happy with unlimited illegal immigration in theory, but neither much wants to pay for it. Immigrant advocates, in contrast, aren’t shy about hitting up local taxpayers.
Ashley Tjhung of the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, which coordinates charities assisting illegal alien arrivals in Washington, said, “The mayor is sitting on millions of dollars within the D.C. budget.”
Mayors like Bowser and Adams, if they wish to remain true to their “open borders, no enforcement,” sanctuary city rhetoric, will have to delve deeper into voters’ pockets and ask them to divert resources intended for local residents to illegal aliens, with no end in sight.
