Some of the top Democratic leaders of two major cities are begging President Joe Biden to send them more money to help deal with the huge surge in illegal immigrants that have come to the regions.
In addition, they say that bureaucratic bookkeeping is causing them to be significantly shortchanged.
Brad Lander, the comptroller of New York City, and Annettee Guzman, the budget director of Chicago, are imploring Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to loosen rules about how to collect identification numbers that are given to illegal immigrants as they enter into America.
The two financial heads sent an official letter to Mayorkas recently, writing that DHS only informed them that they needed to gather “A-numbers” two months ago — more than one year after the migrants started to arrive in their cities.
As the letter reads:
“Since the Spring of 2022, our cities have expended tremendous local resources to provide immediate shelter and care for tens of thousands of newly arrived migrants, filling in the gaps of a broken immigration system.”
They also noted that cities have spent “many times more on services for migrants than we have been awarded by the federal government.”
The letter also added:
“To date, however, we have not received all the federal reimbursement funds that were awarded to our cities, due to significant administrative barriers in the requirements for reimbursement.”
In a separate interview, Lander said New York City is due more than $100 million in federal money that is currently being locked away. According to the latest figures that the city has provided, there have been nearly 170,000 migrants have arrived in New York since spring 2022.
Back in November, Lander traveled to Washington, during which time he learned that New York City only got about $45 million of the $145 million that the Department of Homeland Security had granted it.
DHS officials said the remaining funds would only be released if Mayor Eric Adams gave them identification numbers for the migrants, However, the Adams administration said it didn’t initially know that it needed to collect that information.
In the letter, Lander pointed out that the city has had to spend $1.4 billion to help care for the migrants that have come there. It’s so much, in fact, that Adams has warned that major cuts would have to be made to the budget of just about every city department.
Over in Chicago, Guzman said that they’ve received just $11 million of the total $290 million that they’ve been forced to spend on migrants.
Chicago has provided the illegal immigrants with housing and plenty of other services, but at first, they didn’t collect the “sensitive personal immigration information including A-numbers” because there are local laws that deal with confidentiality, according to the letter.
In a separate interview, Guzman explained:
“Private information is not necessarily something every migrant is willing to give us. There’s a sense of fear in how it’s going to be used.”
