Outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday on “CNN This Morning” that Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) should stop sending immigrants to her city.
Discussing a letter she sent to the governor, Lightfoot said, “We have not heard anything back. And frankly, I didn’t expect to hear anything back, but I felt like it was important to once again try to engage the governor, but also let him know what his policies and practices are doing in cities like Chicago. We are completely tapped out. We have no more space. No more resources. And frankly, we’re already in a surge. We’ve been seeing over the last two to three weeks, 200 plus people coming to Chicago every single day. We call them walk-ins, because they’re not coming on buses, but they are coming on planes from San Antonio, and we’re very concerned, because they don’t seem like they’re getting screened at the border. We’ve seen people coming with serious medical issues.”
She continued, “What’s getting lost in what the governor is doing is the fact that these are human beings. In any other emergency, you would be coordinating. You would be collaborating. You would be talking about specifically what the needs of the people are. We’ve seen people come off of these buses that he has sent who are victims of sexual assault, who have serious medical conditions that can’t be dealt with by the paramedics that we have on-site. They’ve got to be rushed to the hospital. Women who are in such an advanced stage of labor that they literally get off the bus and give birth within one of our facilities. That doesn’t make any sense.
Lightfoot added, “So if we don’t put the humanity of these migrants front and center — I understand, and I’m solely compassionate to the fact that the borders are themselves really overrun, but you don’t solve that problem by simply sticking people on buses to a city that they didn’t ask to, for an uncertain future, and now we are literally full.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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