migrants
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According to city officials, a controversial voucher program for migrants in New York City to get food using debit cards is ending.
New York City announced that it will discontinue a program that gave vouchers to migrants to pay for food, putting an end to an initiative that had been long assailed by conservatives and associated pundits. The vouchers came in the form of prepaid debit cards. “As we move towards more competitive contracting for asylum seeker programs, we have chosen not to renew the emergency contract for this pilot program once the one-year term concludes,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.
The program, which began in late March, provided debit cards for food and baby supplies to 2,600 migrants who arrived in the city and were staying in hotels funded by the city. The debit cards could only be used at convenience stores, bodegas, and supermarkets. They would be unusable at other businesses. Mobility Capital Finance, or MoCaFi, was the private company that won a no-bid, emergency contract for $400,000 to run the program for one year.
The program distributed the cards at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan to participants, totaling $3.2 million. It was a sea change from a previous food distribution system managed by another private medical company, DocGo, which obtained a $432 million contract from the city before troubling allegations forced the city to phase the contract out.
Conservatives have attacked the program since its creation, claiming it was ripe for fraud, but no instances of bad behavior with the debit cards have occurred. City Comptroller Brad Lander also previously revoked the city’s ability to enter into emergency deals for migrant services. While an estimated 700 migrants are entering New York City each week seeking asylum, 1,000 are making their way out. Mayor Adams William Fowler, a spokesperson at City Hall, said that Mayor Adams is open to potentially pursuing the installment of a similar program in the future. “We will continue to implement and learn from innovative pilot programs like the immediate response cards program as we care for hundreds of new arrivals every week,” he said in an interview.
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams may be looking for a pardon from Donald Trump, but there are considerable political risks for him.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House has created a conundrum for New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Adams could find himself as the beneficiary of sympathy from the president-elect as he faces federal corruption charges, but actively courting favor from Trump would put him squarely against his own political party.
The tension surrounding that situation was evident to all during a press conference held on Wednesday by Adams and his staff after the election results were released. The mayor stressed that they would work with the incoming federal administration. “We will work with the new administration and Congress to develop a realistic and compassionate national strategy for our immigration system,” he said. When asked about Trump’s victory and the effect it could have on his court case, Adams simply smirked and refused to answer as he left the podium.
https://x.com/katie_honan/status/1854211493845221628?s=46
Trump mentioned Adams’ case at the Alfred E. Smith dinner in the city last month. “I just want to be nice because I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump said then. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so were you.” He has previously pardoned high-level Democratic politicians who’ve run afoul of the law – former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Adding to the pressure-filled situation is the fact that Trump and Adams both enjoy friendships with noted Republican backers including former mayoral candidate and billionaire John Catsimatidis and radio host Sid Rosenberg (who offered to be a go-between the two). “Do you protect New York as a sanctuary city, or do you consider your own liberty in that equation?” said Basil Smikle, a former Democratic strategist and current Columbia University professor. “What’s going to win out?”
With an estimated half-million undocumented immigrants living in New York City and over 210,000 migrants who’ve arrived since 2022, Trump’s vow of mass deportation looms larger. Adams has clashed with the Biden administration and members of his own city council and the Democrats over their handling of migrants. Observers have noted that the situation could reflect on his upcoming primary. “There may be an interest in having more progressive leadership or at least a leadership that isn’t bogged down by these investigations,” Smilke stated.
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Source: The Washington Post / Getty
On Tuesday (April 2), GOP candidate and current commander-in-criminal-indictments Donald Trump took the xenophobic bigot tour he calls his presidential campaign to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he called brown people who entered the U.S. illegally “animals” and declared that they’re “not human.”
“A 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal,” Trump said in reference to the violent death of Laken Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University who was found dead in a wooded area at the University of Georgia campus in Athens on Feb. 22, and who authorities believe was killed by an undocumented migrant from Venezuela.
“The Democrats said please don’t call them animals, they’re humans. I said no, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals. And Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, ‘Please don’t use the word animals, sir, when you’re talking about these people.’ I said, ‘I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.’”
Since news of Riley’s death broke, MAGA conservatives have been exploiting her story to craft a racist narrative that migrants coming into the U.S. from our southern border are causing violent crime to spiral out of control because they can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum research it would take to know there haven’t been any surges in crimes in the cities most migrants have come to, and, in fact, in many of those cities, crime rates have fallen.
Trump, in his usual bigoted fashion, is taking things a step further and using this single case of a citizen allegedly being murdered by an illegal immigrant as an excuse to completely dehumanize migrants whether they have done anything wrong or not.
This is, after all, the same orangey-white nationalist who previously likened migrants to Hannibal Lecter and claimed many of them speak languages so foreign (as in “from the planet Mars”) that no linguists in the developed world can translate. And lest we forget, Trump entered the political arena generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime.” (Now, he’s out here slanging $60 Bibles and $400 “Air Treasons” because his own alleged crimes appear to have caught up with him financially.)
A vote for Trump is a vote for the normalization of outright bigotry. This much is clear.
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