New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently sidestepped a reporter’s question regarding the closure of a New York City school to house illegal immigrants. The Big Apple has been strained by the continual inflow of migrants into the city, where infrastructure and resources are being depleted.
It was recently announced that James Madison High School in Brooklyn would temporarily shift its students to remote learning capabilities to house nearly 2,000 illegal immigrants. The shift happened because the city thought severe weather necessitated moving the migrants inside for a day. Fox Business reporter Hillary Vaughn pressed Ocasio-Cortez on the shutdown of the high school.
“You know, I think it’s — Again, this is not, it’s not in my district,” Ocasio-Cortez responded to Vaughn. “I think it’s very clear here that what’s most important is that we identify a facility that’s appropriate for these folks. I don’t anticipate this being a long-term solution. It shouldn’t be a long-term solution.”
Former MTV VJ Kennedy slammed AOC’s response, stating, “Wow, what a non-answer!” She continued, “Yeah, it’s not my district, you guys, so I don’t really have to worry about anything. It’s her policies and that’s the problem, is people like AOC aren’t taking ownership of their philosophy, which is bankrupting cities across the country and people in New York, people in Chicago never really had to think about the immigration crisis, because to them it was theoretical. Well, now it’s actual.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams defended the decision to shut down the school amid an impending storm that would impact the city. Adams is undergoing the difficult challenge of navigating the migrant crisis, where he recently announced budget cuts to free up financial resources.
The American Tribune has reported on Adams’ recent comments over the past year, highlighting the effect the crisis has had on New York City. Adams has even gone as far as suggesting the issue at hand could “destroy” his city.
Illustrating the strain on the city’s infrastructure, Adams noted that the city is “literally” running out of room to manage the massive inflow of migrants. “We’re not just saying we’re out of room as a sound bite — we’re out of room, literally,” the mayor said. “People are going to be eventually sleeping on the streets.”
Adams further suggested New York City has figuratively bitten off more than it can chew with its sanctuary city designation. “We cannot by law tell someone if they come into the city, ‘You can’t come into the city,’” he continued. “We can’t even turn them over to ICE … the law states that we cannot notify ICE. I cannot break the law and enforce the law.”
“We’ve seen the erosion of the quality of life that we’ve improved on in such a short period of time of this administration. And we have been impacted,” Adams said. “For, for many months, we were able to keep the visualization of this crisis from hitting our streets. But we have reached a breaking point, we no longer able to do that, because of the volume in numbers,” illustrating the extent to which the migrant crisis has developed over time.
Watch AOC dodge the question here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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