(Headline USA) Democratic states and cities have spent tens of millions of dollars allocated to them as COVID-19 relief on illegal immigrants, according to Fox News.
A review of state and local programs shows Democrat governors and mayors have spent at least $517 million on initiatives for “undocumented residents.”
The funding largely came from the American Rescue Plan Act—the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package passed under a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2021, through the ARP’s Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund.
With the vaccines having already made their way into circulation, it was widely recognized that the so-called stimulus package would serve as essential life support in an economy wrecked by mandatory shutdowns, as similar Trump-era packages had been.
Instead, it would be purely discretionary funding in the hopes of jolting a recalcitrant public back to normal.
Outrageously, the plan openly encouraged wasteful and profligate spending on leftist wish-list items—including universal basic income, labor unions, drag queens, Black Lives Matter and “anti-racism” studies—while including statutes that specifically prohibited red states from applying the allocated relief funds to offset state tax cuts.
Meanwhile, with President Joe Biden’s aggressive open-borders program still in its infancy, sanctuary states including Washington, Illinois and New Jersey—as well as the cities of Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Denver and Boston—all used this funding mechanism to support illegals, the review found.
In Washington state, government officials allocated $340 million in ARP funding for a so-called “COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund,” which was then used to send one-time cash grants worth at least $1,000 to illegal immigrants. More than 100,000 illegal immigrants in the state received payments of $3,075 through the program, according to the Washington state Department of Social and Health Services.
In Illinois, the state government used $71.8 million in ARP funds to provide cash payments to “households that were not eligible” to receive stimulus checks from the federal government “due to immigration status.”
And in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration set aside $60 million in ARP funds for the “Excluded New Jerseyan Fund,” which sent cash payments worth up to $4,000 per household to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants during the pandemic. The program defined “excluded New Jerseyans” as “undocumented individuals, residents re-entering from the justice system,” and others excluded from the stimulus package.
“This means the Biden Administration directly subsidized ‘undocumented’ immigration under the guise of COVID-19 pandemic relief,” a recent report from the Economic Policy Innovation Center explained.
“[T]he Biden Administration is directly subsidizing undocumented immigration while simultaneously claiming the checks do not count in determining if a recipient is dependent on the government and thus a public charge and ineligible for permanent residence,” EPIC noted in its report on the government slush fund.
Democratic officials in several big cities, including Boston and Denver, have since announced significant budget cuts due to the relentless influx of illegal immigrants and, after having offered considerable incentives for them to show up, are now declaring states of emergency and demanding even more resources to contain the issue.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
