Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker said he is deploying 75 National Guard members following the large influx of migrants being sent to Chicago and other major cities, from Texas and Arizona.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sent buses to the likes of DC, New York, and Chicago as the large influx of migrants continues to arrive to the American border.
“The governor of Texas is forcing on New York and D.C. and Chicago – and potentially other places – a needlessly last-minute and complex process that is a heartless display of politics over people,” Pritzker said. “Why not give reasonable notice? Why send these folks only to blue cities or blue states? Why isn’t Abbott sending refugees to Mississippi, Oklahoma or Idaho? This is about politics for him.”
“Pritzker said that in Illinois, they will “refuse to stoop to that man’s level.”
Pritzker said that the guardsmen were “logistics professionals who will help local governments receive and transport new arrivals,” and said that they would only be deployed until “we put in place additional staffing on the ground.”
Prizker said that his work was going alongside congressional representatives in the state. “I am also pursuing every federal resource available to assist in this response. I’ve personally spoken with members of our congressional delegation who assure this is a top priority for them,” he said, according to Fox News.
“These are people who are in our country legally. I repeat – they have been screened at the border, they have legal permission to temporarily reside in our country. They are asylum seekers, fleeing oppression or persecution in their own countries,” he continued.
“These are people who have not been accused of doing anything wrong. But upon arrival here there have been some anti-immigrant people who have tried to label these refugees with vicious suspicions about drugs and guns – accusations of which there is literally not a shred of evidence,” he claimed. “The arriving families are poor and they are people of color. And that is apparently all some people need to level baseless accusations.”
