Tag Archives: Migrants

Group accused of making up story about homeless vets being evicted to make room for migrants – The Associated Press

  1. Group accused of making up story about homeless vets being evicted to make room for migrants The Associated Press
  2. Fox News Stoked Outrage Over Migrants Displacing Homeless Vets. It Was a Hoax. The Daily Beast
  3. New York homeless men say they were offered money to pose as military veterans and falsely claim they were pushed out of a hotel to make room for migrants CNN
  4. Homeless men say they were recruited to pose as displaced vets Times Union
  5. NY lawmaker denounces claim that veterans were evicted in favor of migrants as false, calls for investigation Fox News
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New York homeless men say they were offered money to pose as military veterans and falsely claim they were pushed out of a hotel to make room for migrants – CNN

  1. New York homeless men say they were offered money to pose as military veterans and falsely claim they were pushed out of a hotel to make room for migrants CNN
  2. NY lawmaker denounces claim that veterans were evicted in favor of migrants as false, calls for investigation Fox News
  3. Longtime advocate lied about vets getting kicked out of NY hotels for migrants: pol New York Post
  4. Homeless men say they were recruited to pose as displaced vets Times Union
  5. Democrats’ message to Americans: If you’re not a migrant, go to the back of the line Fox News
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CNN Border Correspondent Reports ‘There’s Actually Fewer Migrants’ Than Before Title 42 Ended Friday – Mediaite

  1. CNN Border Correspondent Reports ‘There’s Actually Fewer Migrants’ Than Before Title 42 Ended Friday Mediaite
  2. Title 42 immigration policy expires, ending pandemic-era restrictions at border Los Angeles Times
  3. Biden takes zero questions, smiles silently as press is kicked out amid post-Title 42 chaos at border Fox News
  4. Uncertainty clouds US transition at Mexico border as new rules take effect | Latest News | WION WION
  5. Biden’s new border policy just another ‘band-aid,’ says journalist Caitlin Dickerson CNN
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El Paso prepares to start busing migrants again — and NYC could see surge in arrivals – New York Post

  1. El Paso prepares to start busing migrants again — and NYC could see surge in arrivals New York Post
  2. Cops ‘babysitting’ migrants in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago as police sound alarm: ‘They have no plan’ Fox News
  3. South Shore residents decry city’s plan to use shuttered school as migrant ‘respite center’ CBS Chicago
  4. Migrants sent to Chicago by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to move into park district fieldhouses, unused South Shore school building WLS-TV
  5. Of buses and race: Mayor Adams is wrong to claim that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is only sending migrants to cities with Black mayors New York Daily News
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Chicago migrants: Mayor Lori Lightfoot warns Texas Governor Greg Abbott city at capacity with more migrants expected Monday – WLS-TV

  1. Chicago migrants: Mayor Lori Lightfoot warns Texas Governor Greg Abbott city at capacity with more migrants expected Monday WLS-TV
  2. Chicago Mayor calling for Texas Governor Abbott to stop bussing migrants to her city KENS 5: Your San Antonio News Source
  3. Lori Lightfoot pleads with Gov. Abbott to stop sending migrants to Chicago: ‘Dangerous and inhumane’ Fox News
  4. Texas Will Start Bussing Migrants To Chicago Again Monday, Creating ‘Humanitarian Crisis,’ Lightfoot Says Block Club Chicago
  5. Another wave of migrants expected in Chicago from Texas CBS Chicago
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15 migrants found trapped in train car near Uvalde: 2 dead, others hospitalized – KSAT San Antonio

  1. 15 migrants found trapped in train car near Uvalde: 2 dead, others hospitalized KSAT San Antonio
  2. Two migrants found dead on train near Uvalde; 10 others in need of medical attention KENS 5: Your San Antonio News Source
  3. Texas train derailment: Uvalde emergency workers respond to scene where multiple migrants injured in rail car, police say KTRK-TV
  4. Uvalde police: Numerous migrants found injured inside train car in Texas Texas Public Radio
  5. Two migrants found dead on train near Knippa; 10 others in need of medical attention KENS5.com
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NYPD tells asylum seekers camped out in Midtown to leave as lawmakers head to Brooklyn to tour new shelter

NEW YORK — Controversy continues to brew over the city’s decision to move asylum seekers from the Watson Hotel in Midtown to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.

On Wednesday, City Council members visited the new facility.

But what do the men who have moved there think?

The lawmakers joined in on the chorus of calls, criticizing the living conditions inside the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal — the new home to 1,000 asylum seekers.

“The city of New York is trying to discourage people from staying in their care and that’s why they have set up this kind of congregate facility in the way that they have,” Councilman Lincoln Restler said.

READ MOREAsylum seekers camped outside Watson Hotel say they want to hear from Mayor Eric Adams directly

For days, the city has struggled to convince those staying at the hotel in Midtown to move to Red Hook so that hotel rooms can be given to families.

Many have refused, choosing to camp out in the cold in front of the Watson while arguing the new shelter is isolated, lacking in transportation, with cots stacked head to toe.

CBS2’s Ali Bauman witnessed NYPD officers outside the Watson Hotel on Wednesday night telling those who were still staying on the sidewalk to pack up and leave.

Asylum seekers CBS2 spoke to in Brooklyn on Wednesday said they adjusted just fine.

“A single man can go anywhere, sleep anywhere, eat whatever, but with a kids, it’s a different matter,” said Oscar Marin of Colombia.

The city has been fighting the negative reaction by posting videos and pictures of the facility, reiterating there’s nearly 100 toilets, controlled temperature, hot showers, and three meals per day.

Mayor Eric Adams is accusing some bad actors of spreading misinformation.

“The overwhelming number of them move. From my analysis about 30 are still there, and I’m not even sure they are migrants. There are some agitators that just really … I think is doing a disservice to the migrants,” Adams said.

READ MOREMayor Adams’ plan to use Brooklyn Cruise Terminal as emergency shelter for asylum seekers faces backlash

But advocates say it’s no surprise why people would be upset.

“Nobody wants to be sleeping with 999 people in the same room. I think it’s a very difficult position to be put into, especially for clients who have undergone a lot of trauma,” said Kathryn Kliff, attorney at the Legal Aid Society.

Activists and council members say there’s no reason the city can’t open up more hotels for the asylum seekers, adding the move to Brooklyn is adding to their trauma.



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It’s the land of the freebies for NYC’s ‘entitled’ migrants

Say this for the migrants demanding more free stuff from City Hall: they’re fast learners about the new American ethos of endless entitlement.

Schooled and led by far-left activists, they arrive here within days of illegally crossing the southern border and claiming asylum, then start agitating for better accommodations in pricey neighborhoods. 

Tents in The Bronx, barracks in Brooklyn or homeless shelters anywhere are not good enough. Only first-class Manhattan hotels, where the city pays upward of $500 a night per room, are acceptable.

The welcome wagon comes with free food, free cellphones, free transit passes, free school and free health care.

Unfortunately, the booty is not free for taxpayers, which brings us to the slow learners in the sad saga.

That would be the gang at City Hall that is hell-bent on proving once again that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The open-ended promises are a prime example of how Eric Adams missed key lessons at mayoral school.

His predecessors learned that if you say come and get it, people will come and get it, especially when it’s free. Adams apparently believed his election had changed human ­nature. 

Many migrants have said that they refuse to move to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
REUTERS

Mixed messages

Recall that he loudly embraced New York’s status as a sanctuary city and urged the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, to send 200 migrants a day to Gotham. In one of his many mixed messages, Adams opened that door even as he denounced Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for sending busloads of other migrants.

And he said nothing about the secret nighttime migrant flights to area airports arranged by the Biden White House. Are only migrants sent by Democrats welcome?

It was the exact wrong way to look at the problem. Abbott and other border state leaders, frustrated with being ignored by Biden as more than 5 million people have crossed the border, were legitimately trying to spread the pain in hopes of making Adams and other Dem mayors allies for securing the crossing points. 

Nonetheless, by October, some 17,000 migrants had arrived here, with most living in crowded city shelters that already housed nearly 60,000 homeless people. With a clear change in tone, Adams suddenly declared a state of emergency and said the city had no more room at the inn.

“New Yorkers are angry,” he said. “I am angry too. We have not asked for this.”

Actually, he had. But he was also banking on fellow Dems in Albany and Washington delivering financial aid. 

First he said the cost would be $1 billion, then he said $2 billion. 


Gov. Hochul snubbed the mayor’s request to send 500 migrants to upstate cities. 
Kristin Callahan/Shutterstock

No matter — the result was the same: zero. That’s how much help Adams has gotten from his friends even as the number of known migrants approaches 45,000. 

Gov. Hochul also snubbed his modest request to scatter 500 around to upstate cities. 

Meanwhile, Adams’ supposed allies on the City Council undercut him in a different way. They demanded he take down tent cities, put migrants in hotels and give them permanent housing. 

So here we are, and the soaring cost is only part of the problem. There is an immediate impact on the city’s already-declining quality of life.

Take the mess at Midtown hotels, which The Post’s Tuesday front page smartly labeled “Inn-Sane!” The three-star Watson Hotel on West 57th Street would normally be a mecca for big-spending tourists, but instead the scene is chaotic with some migrant refuseniks pitching tents on the sidewalk in a bid to stay at the hotel instead of being shipped to a cruise ship terminal in Red Hook.

Never mind that the city filled the cavernous Brooklyn space with cots, pillows and blankets and provided large communal toilets and showers.

“The cruise ship terminal is not as good as the hotel,” a 42-year-old Venezuelan man told The Post.

There you have it — more entitlement than gratitude. In a heartbeat, that migrant’s mindset has gone from dreaming of freedom in America to demanding luxury accommodations in Manhattan — for free, of course.

The chaos is not limited to the Watson. The Post, acting on information and photos provided by a whistleblower employee, reported three weeks ago about the unfolding disaster at another Midtown hotel leased by the city for migrants, the Row Hotel on Eighth Avenue near Times Square.

“Nearly a ton of taxpayer-provided food gets tossed in the trash every day,” the paper said, because the migrants would “rather secretly cook their own meals on dangerous hot plates.” 

The photos showed garbage bags full of unopened sandwiches and a room littered with empty beer cans.

The employee, Felipe Rodriguez, said there was a “dramatic” change when the city took over the hotel in October.

“There are some nice migrants in that hotel looking for that American dream, that second chance to make it in society,” he said. “But there are a lot of migrants there that are causing chaos. We have a lot of fights, a lot of drugs, a lot of sexual harassment abuse.”

He said there was no supervision for migrants who were supposed to be quarantined for COVID, chicken pox and other infectious diseases. An NYPD source confirmed to the paper that cops have responded to numerous incidents at the Row, formerly known as the Milford Plaza.


Migrants have been encouraged to camp in front of the Watson by liberal activists.
Gregory P. Mango

Obviously, the crime element is not something the city needed to import. It’s got more than enough of the home-grown variety and, while murder and shootings are down, too many streets and neighborhoods remain haunted by menace and violence. 

To be clear, the migrants didn’t invent the entitlement approach. They are taught to demand what they want by open-border activists who won’t be satisfied until New York looks and feels like Caracas. Nor do the leaders care that the lack of serious vetting provides an open door for drug smugglers, gangbangers and sex traffickers. 

Operating through lawyers and charities, and often with government funding, the activists denounce American society as racist, which is both outrageous and ironic. After all, the supposed racism doesn’t curb the desire of tens of millions of people from around the world to come here. 

That’s small comfort for taxpayers, nor is it helping Adams look like the mayor he promised to be. On election night, he vowed to be the new face of his party and show America how to run a city. 

If this is what he had in mind, heaven help New York.

RX for ‘docs’

Reader Dick Gardner makes a point about classified documents, writing: 

“Classified material is signed out like library books — only stricter, and each document has a serial number. There should be a list of everything that’s missing and both Trump and Biden should have been told years ago to turn them in.”

Stop zinging the ‘blues’ 

Ruth Cohen is repelled by events in Tennessee: “If they keeping making the police profession miserable, only scoundrels and felons will apply. Then we will all have to seek protection from sadists, as we saw in Memphis.”

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EU wants to send more migrants away as irregular arrivals grow

  • EU border agency says 2022 irregular arrivals highest since 2016
  • Ministers discuss stepping up returns to states including Iraq
  • Hardline migration ideas return to fore
  • Top EU migration official says no money for ‘walls and fences’

STOCKHOLM, Jan 26 (Reuters) – European Union ministers on Thursday sought ways to curb irregular immigration and send more people away as arrivals rose from pandemic lows, reviving controversial ideas for border fences and asylum centres outside of Europe.

EU border agency Frontex reported some 330,000 unauthorised arrivals last year, the highest since 2016, with a sharp increase on the Western Balkans route.

“We have a huge increase of irregular arrivals of migrants,” Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson told talks among the 27 EU migration ministers. “We have a very low return rate and I can see we can make significant progress here.”

Denmark, the Netherlands and Latvia were among those to call for more pressure through visas and development aid towards the roughly 20 countries – including Iraq and Senegal – that the EU deems fail to cooperate on taking back their nationals who have no right to stay in Europe.

Only about a fifth of such people are sent back, with insufficient resources and coordination on the EU side being another hurdle, according to the bloc’s executive.

The ministerial talks come ahead of a Feb. 9-10 summit of EU leaders who will also seek more returns, according to their draft joint decision seen by Reuters.

“The overall economic malaise makes countries like Tunisia change from a transit country to a country where locals also want to go,” said an EU official. “That changes things. But it’s still very manageable, especially if the EU acts together.”

‘WALLS AND FENCES’

That, however, is easier said than done in the bloc, where immigration is a highly sensitive political issue and member countries are bitterly divided over how to share the task of caring for those who arrive in Europe.

The issue has become toxic since more than a million people crossed the Mediterranean in 2015 in chaotic and deadly scenes that caught the bloc off guard and fanned anti-immigration sentiment.

The EU has since tightened its external borders and asylum laws. With people on the move again following the COVID pandemic, the debate is returning to the fore, as are some proposals previously dismissed as inadmissible.

Denmark has held talks with Rwanda on handling asylum applicants in East Africa, while others called for EU funds for a border fence between Bulgaria and Turkey – both ideas so far seen as taboo.

“We are still working to make that happen, preferably with other European countries but, as a last resort, we’ll do it only in cooperation between Denmark and, for example Rwanda,” Immigration Minister Kaare Dybvad said on Thursday.

Dutch minister Eric van der Burg said he was open to EU financing for border barriers.

“EU member states continue making access to international protection as difficult as possible,” the Danish Refugee Council, an NGO, said in a report on Thursday about what it said were systemic pushbacks of people at the bloc’s external borders, a violation of their right to claim asylum.

While EU countries protest against irregular immigration, often comprising Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa, Germany is simultaneously seeking to open its job market to much-needed workers from outside the bloc.

“We want to conclude migration agreements with countries, particularly with North African countries, that would allow a legal route to Germany but would also include functioning returns,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in Stockholm.

Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop and Bart Meiejer, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Bernadette Baum

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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NYC’s Eric Adams to tour migrant shelters, visit southern border during El Paso trip

Mayor Eric Adams has a stacked schedule Sunday in El Paso, Texas — where he’ll set eyes on the border crisis that has his own city stretched to the absolute limit.

Hizzoner will spend the day visiting migrant shelters, touring a border patrol processing facility and meeting with local officials including El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser before flying back home to the Big Apple.

He and Leeser — who’s bussed thousands of migrants to New York City — will meet to discuss how the border crisis has affected the local community there, according to Adams’ office.

Adams will visit a local migrant shelter, a facility that provides services to them and a Customs and Border Protection processing facility. He’ll also visit the southern border.

Adams will then hold a press conference later in the day.

His jaunt to the Lone Star State comes two days after he projected the migrant crisis would cost New York City as much as $2 billion — double what he initially estimated.

Over 36,000 migrants have landed in New York City since the spring.
James Keivom

“We have to ask ourselves, where we [were] already dealing with a potential $5, $6 billion budget deficit in the outyears. Where does that money come from?” said Adams during a Caribbean Power Jam Radio interview on Friday, a day after he announced cuts to just about every city agency.

“That money comes from our schools. It comes from our public safety, our hospitals, our infrastructure, our ACS services, those are our tax dollars that it’s coming from and we got to see an impact in every service we have in the city,” Adams continued, calling it “irresponsible” that there has been no federal response to the border crisis yet.

Adams said last week that over 36,000 migrants have landed in New York City since the spring.

Adams estimated the migrant crisis could cost NYC up to $2 billion.
Paul Martinka
A child is passed over a chain-link fence at the southern border.
James Keivom

On Friday, he called on Gov. Kathy Hochul — who not once mentioned the migrant crisis in her State of the State address last week — to immediately take 500 migrants off his hands via an “emergency mutual aid request.”

“We are at our breaking point. Based off our projections, we anticipate being unable to continue sheltering arriving asylum seekers on our own,” Adams said.

The Adams administration has been forced to pay $275 million in a contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to house at least 5,000 migrants as waves of asylum seekers continue to land in the city from the southern border.

The “emergency” agreement between the city Department of Homeless Services and the Hotel Association puts the city on the hook for as much as $55,000 per migrant.

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