Biden-Harris admin, state and local governments spent $150 BILLION on illegal immigration crisis in 2023

The Biden-Harris administration, state, and local governments spent $150 billion on illegal immigrants in 2023 while American citizens in cities across the US had to do without funding for basics like police and firefighters, according to The New York Post. The Biden-Harris spent $67 billion of that total while the remainder came from state and municipal governments, calculations from the Washington DC-based non-profit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) revealed. That has left huge holes in city budgets, meaning cutbacks for regular US citizens.

As a result, Denver City Council has to cut $45 million from its budget, including $8.4 million from policing and $2.5 million from the fire department so that the city can pay the $90 million earmarked for illegal immigrants. New York City spent $2.3 billion to accommodate migrants in 2023 and 2024, often in four-star hotels. Other city agencies have had their budgets slashed. In South Portland, ME, the mayor has raised property taxes to pay for migrant services while suggesting older homeowners might have to re-mortgage to afford the increased taxes. Chicago is anticipating a $1 billion budget deficit because the sanctuary city has spent so much on illegal immigrants.

FAIR estimated that the total number of illegal immigrants in the country at the beginning of 2022 was 15.5 million, with the federal government dispensing $3,187 per migrant per year. That was a 45 percent increase from 2017.

Of the Biden-Harris administration’s $67 billion in 2023, $6.6 billion went to education and another $25 million went to health care, while welfare programs cost $11.5 billion and policing $23.1 billion. It’s all in the “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2023” report from FAIR.

In this maze of financing that involves the overlapping funding of three levels of government, it is difficult to assess the real cost to Americans of each illegal immigrant, either in terms of how much is spent per migrant or how much less is spent on citizens who suffer from lack of services, The Post noted.

New York City has been flooded with more than 210,000 migrants since the spring of 2022. This has resulted in 150 hotels being converted to migrant shelters where illegal immigrants live and eat for free. The average illegal immigrant costs the city $352 a night for a total budget cost of $2.3 billion over two years. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has cut overall city funding by 5 percent to pay for it.

Police and fire fighting services are the most obvious casualties of the cuts but everything from libraries to early childhood education programs are also affected. Ironically, given its woeful delivery of disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came to the aid of New York City and instituted a Shelter and Services Program in fiscal 2023 to help with the illegal immigration influx.

In a recent interview with Telemundo, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to sanction amnesty for all illegal immigrants now in the US and reject their deportation, an action that has dropped by 74 percent under the Biden-Harris administration.