Watchdog questions high cost of sanctuary in NYC
NEW YORK (WABC) -- More than $7 billion of taxpayer money has been spent to house and care for undocumented immigrants in New York City over the past few years.
The city is in the process of shutting down 50 shelters and hotels that house non-citizens. While the number of people the city cares for is decreasing, 7 On Your Side Investigates looked into why the cost to taxpayers remains high.
When the buses full of undocumented immigrants first rolled into the city, there were so many people and there was nowhere to put them.
Manuel Castro, the Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, was there to greet them and to figure it out.
"We didn't have the resources in place to be able to manage this," Castro said. "Certainly, it has been a challenge, and this is not just a story of how a city responds to a migrant humanitarian crisis, but also how we meet our obligations with local laws."
The city has obligations to shelter anyone who asks for it. The city put up tents and rushed to convert more than 150 hotels into shelters.
"We spent over $7 billion in this response," Castro said.
The yearly budget for asylum seekers has been larger than the budget for the city health department, the sanitation department, and even the fire department.
As of recently, the city is caring for more than 44,500 undocumented immigrants. That's down from 65,000 at the same time last year.
"The crisis is over, but the continued cost is still there," said Ana Champeny of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission. "The city needs to figure out how to manage it more cost-effectively at this point."
Champeny said while the number of noncitizens is going down, the cost to care for them has not.
It costs an average of $370 a day to house an undocumented immigrant in New York City. The cost is significantly higher than the $207 it costs a day to care for someone who is homeless.
"It does call into question why the cost per day is so high and has been stubbornly high; it's been about that $370 level since that crisis began," said Champeny.
When Eyewitness News questioned the Immigrant Affairs Commissioner about the high cost, he said it's, "In large part because we had to set up a system practically overnight and be able to support people we didn't expect would be arriving," Castro said. "There's a lot that goes into understanding the ebb and flow of people, how many need shelter," he said.
Most of the multimillion-dollar contracts were issued under emergency rules, meaning they didn't have as much scrutiny or oversight as typical contracts.
Some of the contracts range from spending $18 million on a motel in Yonkers to $150 million for a hotel in Times Square.
"I think we should be moving out of an emergency state," Champeny said.
The commissioner said they are moving out of an emergency state and believes when we look back at this moment in time in the future, the ends will justify the means.
"Just like so many millions of Americans can trace their story back to Ellis Island, I know that so many people will trace their story back to now," Castro said.
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