Senator Kyrsten Sinema said Wednesday that she is furious that $100 million in federal aid for migrants is being distributed to New York City instead of Arizona, which she says is bearing the biggest burden of the border crisis.
Arizona, her home state, and Texas have been hit with massive influxes of illegal immigrants seeking resources and shelter for months, she said.
“What we’re experiencing here in Arizona is matched only by what folks are experiencing in southern Texas,” the now-independent senator said during an event in the Yuma sector of Arizona near the southern border, according to the Hill. “Those are the two communities that are experiencing this crisis. The rest of the country is seeing some elements of it, but we are facing the brunt.”
Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced Wednesday that $104.6 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds will be sent to New York City to help accommodate the thousands of migrants pouring in.
“It is wrong and unfair that the money is going to places other than south Texas and south Arizona,” Sinema said. “The fact that a yeoman’s amount of this money went to New York City, in my opinion, is wrong because they are not a border state and they are not facing the kind of pressure that we are facing here. I want you to know that I am continuing to fight this, and I am livid.”
Mayor Eric Adams and 54 other NYC Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly pleaded with the federal government to help New York City, which has been overwhelmed by an inflow of illegal immigrants, and to improve border enforcement. Some 93,200 migrants have arrived in the city since spring 2022, according to the New York Post. More than 2,500 migrants are still arriving in the city weekly.
In January, Adams said the city was at its “breaking point” with the arrivals. He toured the border town of El Paso, Texas, and demanded that the Biden administration address illegal border crossings.
“We’re pointing the finger at our national government,” Adams said. “This is a national problem. We must have real immigration reform, and we must immediately have a short-term fix of making sure that the cost of this does not fall on our local cities.”
The White House responded to Adams’s plea by offering a federal liaison, but no additional money.
Earlier this week, dozens of migrants were seen on video sleeping on the ground outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City after the hotel, which has been serving as a makeshift processing center for asylum seekers, reached capacity over the weekend. There were so many migrants waiting to be taken into the shelter that many slept shoulder-to-shoulder across three full blocks, the New York Post reported.
Illegal border crossings surged in July despite the sweltering heat, according to preliminary U.S. Customs and Border Protection data obtained by the Washington Post. This defied a historical pattern that holds that migrant apprehensions typically decrease in the summer.
The uptick in migrant apprehensions was most noticeable in southern Arizona, where temperatures reached above 110 degrees for much of the last month. In the Tucson sector alone, Border Patrol agents arrested around 40,000 illegal immigrants, the highest one-month total for the area in 15 years, CBP data indicate.
Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, told National Review that much migrant traffic that had been entering the U.S. via the Rio Grande in Texas has been redirected to Arizona because of Texas governor Greg Abbott’s crackdown on illegal border crossings.
“Why are numbers going going up in Arizona instead of Texas?” he said. “That is due at least in part to the fact that Abbott is doing everything in his power to disrupt illegal immigration in the Rio Grande.”
Texas border personnel have been cutting down vegetation often used for cover along the border, expanding the state police presence, and erecting razor wire and other physical obstacles along the Rio Grande riverbank, he said.
They’ve also positioned a chain of buoys typically used for maritime harbor security on the water, he said. They roll over when a person tries to climb on them, and they have netting underneath to prevent people from swimming under. Last week, the Justice Department sued Texas over the floating barriers, asking the court to order the state to remove the 1,000-foot stretch of buoys installed near Eagle Pass, Texas. It is also sought an injunction to bar Texas from installing new ones.