Hotels involved in the resettlement of illegal immigrants are making lots of money through New York City’s shelter program for illegal immigrants, a former hotel worker said on Fox News Monday.
The average cost of a hotel room jumped from $277.92 in 2022 to $301.61 in 2023, and more than 130 hotels have joined the city’s shelter program by opening their doors to migrants, The New York Times reported. The shelter program is seen as a factor in the shortage of hotel rooms for tourists and other travelers, and Carlos Arellano, a former hotel worker, said that owners are “loving this because the money is just going around and around.”
“When you walk into hotels to work at them, the main hotel staff is not doing anything, they are standing around, but yet they still charge the city for any little thing they can,” Arellano told “Fox and Friends” guest host Rachel Campos-Duffy. “And when you see 10 workers on the first floor of the lobby of the hotel, only two of them are really working, meanwhile the hotel will still charging the city for all 10 staff members, and you really don’t know what’s going on in there until you work in one of these places, but the costs just keep being driven up by the hotels.”
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“I like to tell people when you see someone like a politician on the news saying ‘Oh, we regret, this, we wish this wasn’t happening,’ it’s all lies,” Arellano continued. “Everything from the politicians to the owners of the hotels, everybody is loving this because the money is just going around and around.”
The hotels receive anywhere from $139 to $185 per room per night for sheltering migrants whether or not the rooms are occupied, according to the NYT. Democratic Mayor Eric Adams announced a number of budget cuts in November, including closing libraries on Sundays and freezing hiring for the New York Police Department, as part of the efforts to address the costs of housing migrants arriving in the city.
United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported Border Patrol had 1.6 million encounters with illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2021, 2.2 million in fiscal year 2022 and 2 million in fiscal year 2023, with 1.1 million encounters in fiscal year 2024 to date. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and former Republican Gov. Doug Duceyof Arizona began busing migrants to New York City and other so-called “sanctuary” cities in 2022.
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