New York City is ending its controversial scheme that gave migrant families prepaid debit cards worth a total of $18,500 each.
City Hall made the announcement Thursday, as Mayor Eric Adams has finally listened to critics of the Big Apple’s migrant policies and Adams himself has become friendlier with Donald Trump, who plans massive reforms to the immigration system.
William Fowler, a spokesperson for City Hall, says the program will expire at the end of the year after handing out a total of $3.2 million in cash value for 2,600 families to buy necessities.
The debit cards could only be used at supermarkets and bodegas, Adams said when it began. A family of four with two children could receive up to $350 per week, depending on the children’s ages.
The program became more inconvenient after Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, stripped Adams of his power to make ’emergency deals’ with companies like MoCaFi, who were given $400,000 in a no-bid contract to run the program.
‘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,’ Fowler said in a statement.
However, Fowler did tell Gothamist the program could potentially be restarted but would have to go through an open bidding process for who would run it.
Critics including Adams’ rival on the migrant crisis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Queens born rapper 50 Cent, have questioned why migrants are receiving the cards ahead of struggling New Yorkers.
Abbott blasted the ‘offensive’ scheme as ‘insanity,’ but supporters say it will help the city deal with the strain on its services caused by a surge in migrants in recent months.
Adams insisted the debit cards will save the city $600,000 a month, or $7.2 million annually, by allowing migrants to spend money that will go back into the local economy instead of the city spending funds on boxes of food.
Meanwhile, 50 Cent shared a post on Instagram about the plan to hand out pre-paid cards for migrants to buy food and baby supplies.
‘WTF Mayor Adams call my phone,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t understand how this works, somebody explain this. I’m stuck, maybe TRUMP is the answer.’
It comes after the artist, who was born in New York City, questioned why migrants were being handed free healthcare in California.
Joseph Borelli, the City Council’s Republican minority leader, acknowledged there would be a saving, but questioned the amount being spent on migrants.
‘A lot of New Yorkers are going to take this as something that’s fundamentally unfair,’ he told the New York Times. ‘There are plenty of New Yorkers struggling to pay their bills.’
Trump is expected to crack down on illegal immigration and try to restrict legal immigration when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20, following up on campaign promises and unfinished efforts from his 2017-2021 presidency.
He has pledged to launch the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, focusing on criminals but aiming to send millions back to their home countries, an effort that is expected to tap resources across the U.S. government but also face obstacles.
Trump has said he would restore his 2019 ‘remain in Mexico’ program, which forced asylum-seekers of certain nationalities attempting to enter the U.S. at the southern border to wait in Mexico for the resolution of their cases.
The program was terminated by Democratic President Joe Biden, who ended his faltering reelection campaign in July, making Vice President Kamala Harris the candidate.
Trump also would reinstate the COVID-19-era Title 42 policy, which allowed U.S. border authorities to quickly expel migrants back to Mexico without the chance to claim asylum, he told Time magazine in an interview.
He would use record border crossings and trafficking of fentanyl and children as reasons for the emergency moves, Time reported, citing comments from advisers.
Trump has said he will seek to detain all migrants caught crossing the border illegally or violating other immigration laws, ending what he calls ‘catch and release.’
At a campaign event earlier this month, Trump said he would call on Congress to fund an additional 10,000 Border Patrol agents, a substantial increase over the existing force.
Harris criticized Trump for helping kill a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year that could have added 1,300 more agents.
Trump focused on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border during his first term and has pledged to close gaps in the border wall if elected.
He criticized a Biden asylum ban rolled out last June and pledged to reverse it during a campaign event in Arizona.
Trump said the measure would not adequately secure the border, even though it mirrored Trump-era policies to deter would-be migrants and has contributed to a steep drop in migrants caught crossing illegally.
He also said at the campaign event that he would consider using tariffs to pressure China and other nations to stop migrants from their countries from coming to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance said in a New York Times interview published in October that deporting 1 million immigrants per year would be ‘reasonable.’
He has said he would implement travel bans on people from certain countries or with certain ideologies, expanding on a policy upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
Trump previewed some parts of the world that could be subjected to a renewed travel ban in an October 2023 speech, pledging to restrict people from the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and ‘anywhere else that threatens our security.’
The president-elect said last year that he would seek to end automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. to immigrants living in the country illegally, an idea he flirted with as president.
Trump said last June he would seek to block communists, Marxists and socialists from entering the U.S.
Adams, who has become the much-maligned face of New York City’s migrant disaster, has recently become more friendly to Trump, even before his victory on Tuesday.
The Democrat mayor of New York City has slammed the party’s harsh rhetoric against Trump.
The mayor congratulated Trump on his victory and said he spoke to the president-elect on the phone privately Wednesday.
‘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. The city must move forward and that is what our call is to do.’
Both Adams and Trump have sympathized with each other’s legal plights in the past.
Trump defended Adams at the Al Smith Charity Dinner – which Harris skipped – when mentioning the mayor’s federal indictment on bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign donations.