California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) demanded that the Department of Justice investigate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for “kidnapping” for flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — but Newsom bused homeless people from San Francisco elsewhere.
As National Public Radio reported in 2006, then-San Francisco Mayor Newsom launched the “Homeward Bound” program in an unsuccessful effort to rid the city of homeless people who were attracted by generous welfare and relatively warm weather.
Under the voluntary program, homeless people who applied were given a same-day one-way bus ticket to their cities of origin, “where friends and family may help them,” NPR noted.
NPR reported at the time that Newsom saw the program as a way to save money on public services as well as to remove some of the city’s homeless population:
Send the homeless back home, back to where they’ve come from, where friends and family may help them. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom calls his Homeward Bound program a major success, but as NPR’s Richard Gonzales reports, critics say San Francisco is dumping its problems on others.
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The Homeward Bound program is a brainchild of Mayor Gavin Newsom. He says he was inspired by a media report of a Florida family who rescued their homeless sister from the San Francisco streets.
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Mayor Newsom says Homeward Bound has cost the city less than 100,000 dollars. Compared to the millions of dollars it costs to house the homeless, Newsom says the financial return is obvious.
Last week, Newsom called DeSantis “cruel” for flying migrants out of Florida — where they had already been brought by federal authorities, who have bused and flown tens of thousands of migrants around the country over the past several years.
According to Fox News, Newsom continued to defend the Homeward Bound program as recently as 2019 — claiming, falsely, that the “vast majority” of homeless people in San Francisco came from Texas. The city still has a large homeless population.
“There is no comparison between the two,” a spokesperson for Newsom told Fox News, when asked about the apparent hypocrisy. “SF helped people get home to their families. GOP Republicans kidnapped people for a political stunt.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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