Since April last year, Republican governors have bussed thousands of immigrants to Washington, D.C., and the city is still struggling to absorb the massive influx of noncitizens.
Instead of moving on to other destinations, some of the immigrants are choosing to stay in the city, raising capacity concerns for the local government that illustrate the larger issues surrounding immigration policy in the United States.
According to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), the city has had to accommodate a large number of immigrants in a short period of time without any existing infrastructure to assist them.
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“Most of the migrants, my sense is somewhere around 90%, move on. They have someplace else they want to go. We have been sorely burdened by the roughly 10% who don’t have another place to go,” Mendelson said.
“We are doing our best to step up with services, to help them, to house them, to feed them, and whatever else they need. And, you know, we’re willing to do that, but it is very stressful on us,” he added.
In September, an average of around 300 immigrants per day were arriving in Washington. However, according to the city of El Paso, Texas’s website, in that same month, as many as 1,000 immigrants were being released daily into El Paso.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) said in a statement that Texas will “continue sending migrants to sanctuary cities like D.C. until Pres. Biden & Border Czar Harris step up & do their jobs to secure the border.”
The governor also said that although Texas is a border state, it does not have the capacity to handle the large influx of immigrants regularly released into border cities.
State leaders like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey cited similar reasoning when they also sent buses to sanctuary cities around the country.
Conversely, Mendelson called the bussing “inhumane” and emphasized that Washington does not have the capacity to provide resources to that many immigrants, just as El Paso does not.
“I don’t want to say that this is easy on the border states. … However, they are border states. So the challenge is natural to them because they are border states. We’re not a border state. This is being dropped on us by these governors,” he said.
Other local leaders in Washington have also raised humanitarian concerns about the bussing. Last year, D.C. Councilwoman Brooke Pinto (D) said Republican governors were using human beings for “political stunts,” and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) claimed that many immigrants were getting on buses under false pretenses.
However, officials on both sides of the issue agree that the federal government, either the executive or legislative branch, must step in to solve the border crisis.
“Mayors do a lot of things, but we are not responsible for a broken immigration system. What we need in this country is we need the Congress to do its job and fix this immigration system,” Bowser said.
The D.C. Council voted in September in favor of the Migrant Services and Supports Emergency Act of 2022, which supported Bowser’s declaration of a public emergency in response to the migrant crisis and established the Office of Migrant Services.
The office is not yet operational, but on Monday, Bowser appointed Tatiana Laborde, former managing director of SAMU First Response, a nonprofit organization serving immigrants in the district, to lead the office as migrant services director.
However, there are still objections within the community. Local migrant aid organizations, like SanctuaryDMV, spoke out against the establishment of the Office of Migrant Services because they believe the new directives do not offer enough protections to immigrants.
Specifically, there is controversy around the announcement that, under the new legislation, immigrants will not be offered a path to citizenship in the district. Immigrants will also not be offered the same services afforded to unhoused residents of Washington, which advocates say could make it more difficult for them to access healthcare and shelter assistance.
Republican governors and Washington officials alike have made it clear that their cities cannot afford to foot the bill to provide food, clothing, and shelter to thousands of immigrants.
Both jurisdictions have received reimbursement grants from the federal government for services provided to the immigrants, but city leaders have expressed that they still need more assistance.
“We’ve gotten some assistance from the Department of Homeland Security. I don’t think it’s enough,” Mendelson said.
Recently, the newly passed omnibus funding bill transferred $800 million to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the creation of a new DHS grant program, the Shelter and Services Program. The SSP will support cities facing an influx of migrant arrivals.
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“DHS is providing Emergency Food and Shelter Program funds to help cities around the country better manage the costs of noncitizen arrivals in their communities,” said a DHS spokesperson.
