CHICAGO — Democratic strongholds are struggling to keep helping the surge of migrants in their cities and states — and it’s sparking anxiety in the party about potential fallout heading into the 2024 election cycle.
New York Mayor Eric Adams’ tussle with the White House over an influx of migrants from red states has famously soured his relationship with President Joe Biden. But he’s far from the only blue state official pushing back, as public pressure and budget concerns rise in Illinois, Massachusetts and beyond.
“You’re hearing sentiments that are not dissimilar from what you would hear at [Donald] Trump rallies where asylum-seekers are referred to as illegals,” Chicago Alderperson Andre Vasquez, who heads the Chicago City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said in an interview. “There are people who are saying ‘the Democratic Party isn’t doing anything for us’ and ‘look at what we’re stuck with.’”
While Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have been demonized by the left for sending people to Democrat-led cities and states, overwhelmed officials in those blue jurisdictions are now also moving new arrivals and slamming the Biden administration for not doing enough to help. The administration has responded by picking up part of the tab by allowing some jurisdictions, like Denver, to use FEMA dollars to help pay for transportation of migrants who ask to go to other states.
The tumultuous situation — and building frustration — is shining a spotlight on the glaring federal void on immigration policy and sparking anxiety among Democrats about the potential fallout heading into the 2024 election cycle.
With a presidential election year looming, the situation poses a threat to Biden’s campaign and to battleground congressional candidates across the country. Republicans almost daily hit Biden over the border, and images of migrants crossing into the U.S. are a constant on Fox News. Democratic leaders like Adams are also unrestrained in their criticism of the president for not providing more assistance to help handle the influx of migrants.
“Voters want to see progress and are frustrated that it seems to be getting worse,” said Ian Russell, a national Democratic strategist, referring to the migrant situation. “But they overwhelmingly support comprehensive immigration reform and know that the GOP isn’t interested in solutions.”
Biden took a step last week to ease the pressure on cities by making it easier for roughly 500,000 Venezuelan migrants to apply for work permits that would, in turn, allow them to secure their own housing.
But local officials and lawmakers say more help is needed. They say their communities are ill-equipped to provide the necessary housing, health care and education to asylum-seekers who could be stuck in legal limbo for years due to massive backlogs in over-burdened immigration courts. The lack of housing and services has led officials to move migrants wherever there’s available shelter or services.
“I appreciate the president’s actions, but it’s not enough,” Maura Healey, Massachusetts’ Democratic governor and a member of Biden’s national campaign advisory board, told reporters last week.
Healey’s administration is scrambling to provide shelter and services to more than 6,500 homeless families — or roughly 22,000 people — in the state’s emergency shelter system, half of which are estimated to be migrants. That’s roughly double the number of families that were in the system when Healey took office in early January.
But with traditional shelters long full, the state has been moving migrants and homeless families to dozens of hotels and motels across Massachusetts — often with little warning to local officials left shouldering the burden of connecting their newest residents to food and transportation and enrolling their children in schools.
Protesters, worried that migrants are taking away shelter beds from Massachusetts residents experiencing homelessness, have staged demonstrations and disrupted town meetings on Cape Cod, a redder region in the deep-blue state. Members of the Nationalist Social Club, or NSC-131, a New England-based neo-Nazi group, have demonstrated in front of hotels and a college dormitory housing migrants.
“I really see a lot of this pushback as politically opportunistic,” Democratic state Sen. Julian Cyr, a Healey ally who represents the Cape and nearby islands, said in an interview. “There’s a bit of this … ‘not in my backyard’ sentiment. I think that’s a minority sentiment.”
Healey has declared an emergency, secured $2 million in FEMA funding and activated up to 250 National Guard members to help out at the hotels and motels serving as shelters, all while “begging” the Biden administration for more money for services and expedited work permits for migrants.
While Biden’s move to extend legal protections and work permits to Venezuelans offered the president a temporary political reprieve, the effects are limited in Massachusetts, where the state says Venezuelans make up only a small percentage of families in the emergency shelter system. Healey is asking the Biden administration to also speed up work authorizations for Haitians who make up a larger share of new arrivals in Massachusetts.
“We’ve been continuing to call upon and call upon the federal government and Congress to act,” Healey told reporters at the State House days before the Biden administration announced the aid for Venezuelans. “And it is because help has not been forthcoming that we find ourselves in this situation.”
Massachusetts, like New York City, is required to provide emergency shelter to qualifying families under the state’s “right-to-shelter” law. But that’s leading some areas to simply transfer migrants to other jurisdictions if there are no shelters available.
Small cities in New York are shouldering an influx of migrants sent by Adams, who in the past has transported asylum-seekers to Florida, Texas and even as far away as China. Last spring, he bussed more than a dozen migrants from New York City to Newburgh, a city of roughly 30,000 residents about an hour north along the Hudson River, as part of a larger push to move about 1,600 asylum-seekers to the suburbs.
That has created an awkward dynamic, with red states like Texas sending migrants to New York City, which in turn sends migrants to small, often GOP-led municipalities.
Adams, who has hammered the Biden administration almost daily for not doing more to help his city or stanch the flow of migrants, has warned that the lack of housing or shelter space in New York City is so dire that children could soon be sleeping on streets. This week, he began enforcing a 60-day shelter limit that could leave thousands of migrants without a place to stay — and is now moving to restrict stays to 30 days. There are more than 60,000 migrants in the city’s care.
Adams has also been critical of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, for arguing that migrants from the city shouldn’t be foisted upon other municipalities and recently urged her to issue a statewide order prohibiting cities from blocking migrants.
New York City is far from alone. Chicago has seen more than 14,000 migrants arrive since 2022 — mostly from Texas. Many others have been sent by buses from Democratic-led Denver or by plane from New York — cities that Chicago officials say are using federal money monies from FEMA to move the new arrivals. It’s straining the Windy City’s safety net as it tries to find shelter for the exploding population just ahead of the brutal winter.
“There’s a reality about the difficulty in maintaining the growth of population and the amount of resources needed to do so, but there’s also a huge insensitivity,” said Vasquez, the Chicago alderperson. “Texas is the big example of people being conned and being told that ‘Chicago’s got everything you need to move the population.’ But we’re seeing it from other states as well.”
Undocumented immigrants have long traveled across the country with the help of family members or aid groups, selecting their destinations based on where there is work, where they have family connections or where others from their home countries have established communities.
A FEMA official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, confirmed that federal funds will cover some migrant travel by air, bus or train for the new arrivals to another city or state, as long as the move happens within 45 days of their release by the Department of Homeland Security. The FEMA funds can be used by aid organizations as well, and migrants can only travel by coach and airfare can’t exceed $700 per person.
New York City, which faces an acute crisis due to the sheer number of migrants, received about $38 million to help reimburse costs New York City has already incurred, though it’s unclear if those funds were used for transportation.
Some find the FEMA process flawed, in part due to a lack of communication between cities and states.
Tensions within the Democratic Party are already noticeable in Chicago, where predominantly Black communities are pushing back at the resources being devoted to new arrivals while those who have long been unhoused are still seeking help.
Chicago Democrats also expect red states to ramp up the number of migrants they send to the city with the approach of the 2024 Democratic Convention, which will be held there. Already, the shortage of shelter beds is so acute that migrants are camping out at police stations and at Chicago O’Hare International Airport until housing can be found.
Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration is pushing ahead to build tented base camps to get migrants off of the floors of police stations and the airport and into the temporary locations.
The Chicago City Council recently voted to approve dispersing $33 million in FEMA funding to care for migrants but, so far, hasn’t used that cash to bus people out of the city.
Denver has transported migrants to Chicago, Salt Lake City, New York and Washington, D.C., but officials there say they only send people out of state if they don’t want to reside in Colorado.
“We are doing our best to accommodate the wishes of migrants who arrive every week. We shelter those who stay and then try to accommodate those whose ultimate destination is elsewhere,” said Alexandra Renteria-Aguilar, director of communications for Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.
Caught in the middle of it all are the migrants, who sometimes find the final destination isn’t as welcoming as expected.
“It’s a difficult situation for our entire country,” said Jason Lee, a senior adviser to Chicago’s mayor. “You have thousands and thousands of people trying to find asylum in the United States. And there’s international and American law that have established the right to asylum, but the system never anticipated this many people pursuing it. So we’re all having to figure out a new model for how we deal with asylum in this country.”
Joe Spector contributed to this report.
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