New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) is receiving backlash over his new pilot program that awards illegal migrants with pre-paid debit cards loaded with up to $10,000 each with virtually no safeguards or fraud controls.
Earlier this month, the city announced its partnership with Mobility Capital Finance to launch a $53 million pilot program that would give migrant families a reloadable prepaid debit card to buy food and supplies.
“Not only will this provide families with the ability to purchase fresh food for their culturally relevant diets and the baby supplies of their choosing, but the pilot program is expected to save New York City more than $600,000 per month, or more than $7.2 million annually,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
BREAKING: New reports suggest that New York City’s contract with an inexperienced bank to hand out debit cards to illegals could cost as much as $10,000 per one.
Democrat mayor Eric Adams has claimed the pilot program would start with 500 families staying at The Roosevelt… pic.twitter.com/8oOWrIQ3g3
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The program will provide $1,000 a month for about 500 migrant families, according to reports, or $35 a day, but Adams pushed back claiming each family will only receive $13 a day.
From the New York Post:
This debit card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multibillion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.
When The Post exposed the mayor’s debit card program earlier this month, the mayor’s office spun it as a money-saving program, to solve a problem: Migrants staying in hotels don’t eat all their food.
…Instead of assuring that its existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.
According to The Post, that $53 million figure is not the money that migrants will receive during the pilot, but the number the vendor Mobility Capital Finance will potentially receive as its fee for services.
In fact, the program could grant the city the power to potentially disburse at least $2.5 billion on these pre-paid debit cards to migrants over a year.
It’s easy to work out how MoCaFi would get a $50 million or so fee, the maximum allowed under the contract. After stripping out various fees the company gets for printing up the blank cards and such, the city has purposely given itself the flexibility to disburse at least $2.5 billion on these pre-paid debit cards over a year.
So, to sum up so far, the Adams administration, with no oversight, no consultation with the city council, and no public discussion, has given itself the flexibility to launch a massive parallel benefits program, alongside — not replacing — traditional welfare cash assistance and (for New Yorkers legally in the country long-term) federal food stamp benefits.
The corrupt scheme prompted City Councilmember Gale Brewer to call for an investigation into the migrant debit card pilot program.
“I think you should bid it out to see who would do the best job at the best cost for taxpayers,” Brewer said.
“I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. I do see from the release it will be for diapers and baby products and food, but you have to be careful that that’s what it’s actually going to be for,” Brewer said.
New York City has already spent $1 billion for at least 170,000 migrants and expects to spend over $10 billion on migrant costs in the coming years.
