New York City Giving Taxpayer-Funded Debit Cards to Over 7,000 Migrants

New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) is expanding his program that rewards newly arrived migrants with pre-loaded debit cards for food — paid for by New Yorkers who remain some of the most tax-burdened residents of the United States.

Adams started the debit cards-for-migrants program in February, noting that it would cost about $53 million to provide roughly 500 migrant families with the prepaid cards meant only for food. The program came even as a study recently found that 56 percent of New Yorkers live near the poverty line.

Now, Adams is looking to hugely expand the number of migrants eligible for the debit cards, the New York Times reveals:

The debit cards are expected to be distributed to more than 7,300 migrants over the next six months at a cost of about $2.6 million, city officials said, building from a pilot program that began earlier this year with roughly 900 families, or nearly 3,000 migrants. [Emphasis added]

…

With more than 60,000 migrants currently in the city’s care, the program — which is expanding from three hotels to 17 — could serve about 1,230 people per month, or roughly 2 percent of the total migrant population. [Emphasis added]

The program is part of a contract with Mobility Capital Finance, known as MoCaFi, that could eventually cost the city as much as $53 million, with as much as $2 million going to the company and the rest being distributed to families, city officials said. Under the pilot program, a family of four with young children received about $350 per week for a month. [Emphasis added]

Over the last two years, more than 200,000 migrants have arrived in New York City, which has done little to disincentivize President Joe Biden’s mass migration despite Adams repeatedly saying that such levels of migration “will destroy” quality of life in the city.

WATCH: NYC Mayor Eric Adams: Migrant Crisis Will Destroy New York City

Aside from the debit cards-for-migrants program, Adams has imposed a widespread migrant hotel policy where hotels are paid by the city’s taxpayers to offer free rooms to newly arrived migrants.

As a result, more than 16,500 hotel rooms across New York City are being occupied by migrants, driving up room prices and making the city more expensive than ever for tourists and visitors. Last year, the average rate for a hotel room in the city was more than $300 a night.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.