Lauren C. Moye, FISM News
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Last week President Joe Biden turned a blind eye to the chaos that his ineffective border policies have brought to New York City, choosing instead to brag on the $292 million federal investment in the new rail tunnel.
Nearly seven out of ten illegal migrants in New York City are housed in hotels in an effort for the city to fulfill its right to shelter law at exorbitant taxpayer expense. Hotel employees warn that once-trendy rooms have been devastated by the effort. Meanwhile, migrants now do not want to leave despite having alternate shelters provided.
The Hudson River Tunnel project brought Biden within two miles of the Watson Hotel on Tuesday. Yet Biden bypassed the three-star hotel where single male migrants were protesting being kicked out of the hotel after the city provided them space at a new migrant shelter.
“We do not want to sleep there like some dogs. We want a better quality of life,” Isaac Castellano, a Venezuelan national who stayed at the Watson since December, told Newsweek about the new shelter.
Castellano was one of the early transfers from the three-star hotel to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal on Jan. 29. The hotel is meant to transition to housing for families, meaning all single male migrants needed to be rehoused. However, Castellano and around 30 other men refused to stay at the shelter.
They set up camp outside the Watson instead. They were there until Wednesday night according to NBC 4, meaning Biden could have easily witnessed this scene. Instead, the President ignored it.
DESTRUCTIVE COST TO CITY
Watson is not the only NYC hotel that has been impacted by the migrant crisis.
In early January, NYC Mayor Eric Adams struck a $275 million contract with the local hotel association to house up to 5,000 migrants across 300 hotels. The mayor’s office has stated that of the 38,000 migrants currently in NYC, 26,000 are staying in rooms.
But not every migrant is appreciative of this cost.
Felipe Rodriquez, an employee of the NYC Row, spoke with Fox News and NY Post about how illegal immigrants have deteriorated the hotel.
“Chaos, total chaos,” Rodriquez described it to Fox News.
He is currently on disability leave after suffering an injury trying to walk through an over-cluttered room.
“There’s no accountability. The city’s so-called running the program [and] allows these people to destroy these rooms. There’s no daily supervision to show these people that…you don’t destroy your hotel. You are only there temporarily.”
Rodriquez described the nice migrants as being overshadowed by those who abuse alcohol and drugs. He said there was “too much violence” and that life at the hotel was a “free-for-all.”
The Row costs NYC taxpayers $650,000 per night, which equals about $500 per room.
Adams has previously estimated that migrants are now costing the Big Apple city around $2 billion.
BIDEN’S ITINERARY SHOWS
Adams has previously pleaded with the Biden administration to take more action to help end the border crisis. He has also asked the White House to provide $1 billion in emergency funds to help alleviate taxpayer burden.
However, Biden’s itinerary kept him in Manhattan and did not address city leaders’ concerns over the cost of sheltering asylum seekers within the city.
Even though Adams attended the Hudson River Tunnel event, Biden did not take the time to meet with him. In fact, a private tour of the project site where Adams was meant to walk with Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul was scrapped.
One city official said that Adams and Biden did meet at a later point, but the length of that conversation is unknown.
Biden also did not schedule a quick visit to any of the migrant shelters or swing by the site of one migrant-led protest.
Democratic city politicians blasted Biden for ignoring the city’s needs in favor of promoting his own agenda.
“It’s almost like, ‘Biden to New York City: Drop dead,’” City Councilman Robert Holden said, according to New York Post. The quote paraphrases a headline from a time another U.S. president refused to respond to the city’s request for funds.