I guess Joe Biden's executive order that was supposed to close the border to asylum seekers isn't doing much good.
Gov. Maura Healey (D-Mass.) sent several of her top aides to several cities in Texas where they visited migrant shelters and told border officials and non-government organizations in no uncertain terms to keep migrants away from the Bay State because the shelters were full.
“This trip is an important opportunity to meet with families arriving in the U.S. and the organizations that work with them at the border to make sure they have accurate information about the lack of shelter space in Massachusetts,” said L. Scott Rice, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general in a statement. Healey appointed Rice to lead the state's overburdened shelter system.
“It is essential that we get the word out that our shelters are full so that families can plan accordingly to make sure they have a safe place to go,” he said.
Other Democratic Party officials, including Mayors Brandon Johnson of Chicago and Eric Adams of New York City, have also been to the border. They also pleaded with NGOs not to send any more migrants their way.
A fat lot of good it did them.
Massachusetts is required to provide emergency housing to homeless families and pregnant people under a decades-old “right-to-shelter” law, similar to a New York City rule. But as state resources grew increasingly strained, Healey capped the emergency shelter system at 7,500 families in October, while opening up overflow sites for the hundreds of families still without a place to go and working to expedite work permits for migrants newly arrived in the state. There are now 7,379 families in shelters and 413 housed in overflow sites.
Her administration is also set to start enforcing nine-month time limits on shelter stays — in compliance with a mandate from the state Legislature to rein in emergency shelter costs that are set to approach $1 billion this fiscal year and next if the rate of new families seeking shelter holds.
The report continues:
Healey and state lawmakers have both begged and berated Congress over immigration, urging federal officials to pass a border bill that would stem the flow of migrants into the U.S. while sending money to states like Massachusetts that have been hit the hardest by the crisis. But congressional Republicans have been unwilling to budge on a bipartisan deal that could deliver a key victory to Biden on one of this election’s top issues.
As we're seeing with the futility of Biden's executive order to stem the flow of migrants on the southern border into the U.S., the bipartisan bill hammered out last February probably wouldn't have done much to reduce illegal immigration. What it might have meant in the future as far as border security is hard to gauge, but as far as the immediate problem of border crossers, drastically reducing asylum seekers hasn't made a big difference.
"The number of families leaving the EA system has steadily increased each month, with more than 331 families leaving in May – the highest number in years," the administration reported.
With nearly 8,000 families in the shelters, Healey has a long way to go to address the problem.
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