Federal agencies moved dozens of unaccompanied illegal immigrant teens to New York without providing any advance notice to relevant officials about their arrival, the New York Post reported.
On Friday, two planes each carrying about 24 unaccompanied teens landed at the Orange County Airport in Montgomery, New York, County Executive Steve Neuhaus, a Republican, told the New York Post. Upon arrival, the minors were put on shuttle buses and sent to several locations in Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and New York City. The flights and buses were chartered by federal agencies.
The Orange County Airport as well as the Steward International Airport located nearby had previously received several illegal immigrants. However, federal agents had not warned about their arrival on those occasions either.
Neuhaus criticized the Biden administration for doing a poor job in dealing with the illegal immigration crisis and stressed the need for more transparency regarding the federal government’s relocation operations.
“It has been absolutely wild,” he told the New York Post. “I have never seen anything like this.”
In an interview with Fox News, Deputy Chief Paul Arteta of the Montgomery police said officials had no idea where the parents of the unaccompanied youths were.
After “dozens of phone calls” to local officials, Arteta learned that the flight was sanctioned by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“We’re being dumped on, and we’re not going to put up with it,” Montgomery Mayor Steve Brescia told Fox News. “We hope there’s no more flights coming into the airport, because we can’t handle it. There’s not enough security there. There’s not enough resources in our community. The taxpayers cannot absorb what they did to us.”
The federal action came as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, issued Emergency Executive Order 224 on Oct. 7, which directs all relevant city agencies to coordinate their response to the immigrant crisis.
In a speech, Adams said that New York City was housing over 61,000 individuals in the shelter systems, with roughly 20,000 children among them. Since April, over 17,000 asylum seekers have been bused to New York from the southern border. By the end of fiscal year 2022, the city will have spent at least $1 billion on the crisis.
At present, New York City’s shelter system is operating at almost 100 percent capacity. If the trend continues, the city could see over 100,000 illegal immigrants in the year to come, Adams said, according to an Oct. 7 press release.
“That’s far more than the system was ever designed to handle,” Adams stated. “This is unsustainable. The city is going to run out of funding for other priorities.”
In the U.S. House of Representatives, 14 Republicans led by Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in late September, asking them to stem the flow of illegal border-crossers from Venezuela.
“If they won’t even try to secure our country & end human trafficking, they can explain themselves to Congressional investigations soon,” Herrell wrote on Twitter.
Reporting from The Epoch Times.
