Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office announced Thursday that New York City will stop providing food vouchers to migrants, CBS News New York reported.
NYC will phase out a program that gives prepaid debit cards to migrant families in city-funded hotels to purchase their own meals and essentials, according to CBS News New York. The program will provide migrant families with debit cards until the end of the year. After that, the city will deliver food directly to migrants.
“As we move towards more competitive contracting for asylum seeker programs, we have chosen not to renew the emergency contract for this pilot program once the one-year term concludes. For over two years, we have provided care to more than 222,000 migrants while saving $2 billion in asylum seeker-related costs,” Adams said in a statement. “We will continue to implement and learn from innovative pilot programs like the immediate response cards program as we care for hundreds of new arrivals every week.”
This news follows a discussion between Adams and President-elect Donald Trump, where Adams revealed in a press conference that they had talked the previous day about partnering on infrastructure, public safety, and other vital issues facing New York City, Politico reported.
.@NeilPatelTDC: Tuesday night’s results were definitive enough that there is reason to hope we may have just closed one of the worst chapters in American history. The political lesson of the Trump era has been glaringly obvious since he first came down the escalator. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/trlfYfYylt
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 6, 2024
“I communicated with the president yesterday to state that there are many issues here in the city that we want to work together with the administration to address,” Adams said. “The city must move forward, and that is what our call is to do.”
While critics labeled the initiative as costly, it was originally designed to cut costs by eliminating pre-prepared meals, Eyewitness News reported. Based on the city calculations, the voucher system was about half as expensive as the previous boxed-meal delivery approach.
Since its inception in late March, the city has handed out prepaid debit cards totaling $3.2 million to approximately 2,600 migrant families, Eyewitness stated. Each card, distributed through the intake center at the Roosevelt Hotel, provided a family of four roughly $350 weekly for shopping locally.
Trump proposed a mass deportation plan Thursday and told NBC News that “there’s no price tag” for his plan. He pledged to begin an aggressive immigration enforcement campaign from his first day in office, focusing on deporting illegal residents with criminal records.
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