Pritzker also called on the administration to play a role in directing where and how migrants are transported once they cross the southern border. The governor’s office said it estimates that numbers will quickly rise, with nearly 1,200 new migrants now arriving in Chicago a day — and temperatures in the city set to soon start dropping.
“This is a major humanitarian crisis that we have never experienced before in the modern age in this city,” Sol Flores, Illinois’ deputy governor, said in an interview. Flores argued the Biden administration could do more, given that the majority of the migrants she sees are seeking asylum.
“They can take over the interior coordination, and they could work with all 50 states,” as well as activate their Office of Refugee Resettlement, she added.
“The federal government has the infrastructure, they have the framework, they have the capacity to do this. They know how to move people.”
It all marks a new era in the debate over immigration facing Biden and it stems from a new kind of migrant crisis, one that’s landed in Democratic-leaning cities and states in middle America, the East Coast and beyond because of the transporting of migrants from Texas, including their busing to those areas by the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott. Abbott, as well as several Texas organizations, began sending migrants to sanctuary cities last year. The cities complained there was no coordination before the arrivals.
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Eventually, left-leaning states like Illinois, New York and Massachusetts declared states of emergencies, asking for federal assistance. Democratic leaders in those states say migrants are overwhelming shelters, schools, hospitals and police stations in places like Chicago, Denver, New York and Massachusetts.
On Thursday, Biden addressed the border wall construction, saying the money had previously been appropriated by Congress.
“I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money,” he said. “They didn’t.”
He also flatly replied “no” when whether he thought the border wall worked. Still, in a notice posted to the Federal register Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejando Mayorkas said: “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers … to prevent unlawful entries.”
In the past year, the states have reported that their situations have only grown more dire, and that’s stirred aggravation in public officials who are typically allies of the president.
Denver is among the cities grappling with the influx. The city recently asked for more state assistance but the number of new people arriving keeps rising, Denver Human Services spokesman Jon Ewing said. He said the aggravation is not just with the Biden administration but with Congress and “the entire federal government.”
“More than anything what we’re looking for is coordination,” Ewing said. “It very much feels like this is a national crisis, but it isn’t being felt by every city equally.”
“El Paso is overwhelmed, we sympathize with El Paso,” he added. “It is a bad situation for everyone right now.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
