DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) – Blue-state lawmakers, who’ve championed open borders for years, are crying foul now that the border crisis is reaching their doorsteps.
Sheena Rodriguez
Northern sanctuary states are petitioning the U.S. government to help address the huge number of migrants illegally entering into or being shipped to their cities by affected border states like Texas, Arizona and Florida.
Sheena Rodriguez, foundress of Alliance for a Safe Texas, an organization devoted to informing the public of the catastrophic consequences of illegal immigration and open border policies, is nonplussed with blue states’ sudden concern about the migrant surge. She commented to Church Militant,
Since their inception, sanctuary cities and states have helped incentivize illegal immigration while claiming to welcome illegal migrants with open arms. They got what they asked for. Complaining about a mere fraction of what Texas and other border states have been forced to contend with for years is laughable and simultaneously infuriating. Y’all made your bed[]; now lay [sic] in it.
Massachusetts, a sanctuary state since 2017, is begging the government for support to help with the state’s surge of migrants. Democrat governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency on Aug. 8 in an apparent inability to deal with the crisis. In a three-page letter to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Healey claimed that “more than 5,500 families are living in emergency shelters and receiving supportive services from the state.” She boasted they are drawn to Massachusetts “because we are and proudly have been a beacon to those in need.”
She asked Mayorkas for financial assistance, blaming the “humanitarian crisis” in her state on “rapid and unabating increases in the number of families with children and pregnant people — many of them newly arriving migrants and refugees — living within the state but without the means to secure safe shelter in our communities.”
New York Democratic governor Kathy Hochul
According to the governor, the inability of migrants to receive work authorizations is a primary driver of the crisis. Hence, she’s called on the DHS secretary to press Congress “to remove barriers for work permits for migrants.” Healey continued, “Our new arrivals are most eager to work. The last thing they want is to be dependent.”
In New York, Democrat governor Kathy Hochul is asking the government for even more taxpayer money. In an interview this week, the purported Catholic said her state and New York City need “more money. I can always use more money.” “We’ve got a real challenge on our hands,” she said, “and we do not want to have people having to be in the streets of New York.”
In lockstep with Healey’s push for expedited work permits for migrants, she recommended “legal work status, temporary protected status, for example, [for] people coming from, let’s say, Venezuela … as we treat the people from Afghanistan and Ukraine and Cuba and Haiti.”
The New York governor’s bid for more money follows New York City’s being gifted with over a million taxpayer dollars in June from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a Shelter and Services Program.
New York Mayor Eric Adams and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema
“Today’s $104.6 million in funds is the largest share of the federal dollars released via the new Shelter [and] Services Program we created and will defray a critical portion of the city’s asylee-related costs,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries — both New Yorkers — said in a statement.
Despite the generous FEMA funds, New York Mayor Eric Adams declared the city has “run out of room” and that he will also need to declare a state of emergency to deal with the crisis. According to the mayor’s office, there are currently 46,000 “asylum seekers” in the sanctuary city.
Former Arizona Democrat, now independent, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is not sending any of her sympathy to Democrat sanctuary states. She expressed outrage that New York City received federal funding to deal with migrants instead of states along the border:
I am livid that the administration is sending money to a part of the country that, while it has a lot of folks showing up in their shelter, they don’t have folks wandering the streets of our small towns and communities or facing heat exhaustion showing up without basics like formula, people coming across the border with chickenpox.
Rodriguez is not sympathizing with the leftist politicians whining about their predicaments. She tells Church Militant that in Texas alone, “there have been more than 900,000 apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection across the five Texas sectors thus far in fiscal year 2023 alone. In preliminary numbers for just the month of July, more than 13,000 known ‘gotaways‘ were reported across the same five sectors.”
She continued,
Texas has spent billions in state taxpayer funds, barely scratching the surface of the negative impacts every one of our 254 counties must endure due to the intentional dereliction of duty of the current administration. In my opinion, sanctuary cities and states shouldn’t receive a dime until they permanently rescind sanctuary policies and demand the current administration enforce immigration laws. Until then, the insincere outrage and pleas for help cannot be taken seriously.
Last month, Rodriguez spoke at the “Defund the Bishops Conference” in Washington. D.C., sponsored by a coalition of a dozen conservative religious organizations, about another culprit in (and beneficiary of) disastrous U.S. open-border policies.
Rodriguez pointed out that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and various dioceses get millions of dollars in taxpayer funding to help illegal migrants. She said the USCCB “lobbied for a total of nearly $30 billion in appropriations of American taxpayer dollars just for the fiscal year of 2024” to bring in and process more illegal migrants.
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In a Q&A following the event, Rodriguez was more specific, explaining what she herself has witnessed: “American homelessness [is spiking]. I’ve been in the Rio Grande area … where Catholic Charities has intentionally kicked out American homeless people to house illegal aliens. How are we going to pretend that this isn’t really happening?”
Massachusetts and New York are not the only Democrat-run areas hustling to address the migrant crisis they helped create. In May, the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois each received $4.3 million in federal taxpayer funding to help with the crisis. In September, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a state of emergency and was promised $16.5 million in FEMA funds.
Rodriguez, a native Texan, doesn’t see any relief in sight for ordinary Americans. “We and the rest of America didn’t sign up for this,” she lamented.