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President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized spending taxpayer money to house migrants in “luxury hotels” while others continue to struggle to afford necessities.
Trump was traveling back to the United States after a four-day trip to Scotland when he was asked about mass migration to the United Kingdom.
A reporter pointed out that many in the U.K. have taken issue with housing migrants in hotels at the expense of taxpayers while their asylum claims are being processed and asked whether Britain needs its own “Alligator Alcatraz.”
It was a reference to Florida’s illegal immigrant detention center on a 30-square-mile property in the Everglades’ swamplands.
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“They’re putting people in luxury hotels and other people that are working their a—- off are living from hand to mouth. They’re not living the same way,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. “I’ve looked at some of the hotels they’re using.”
Trump noted that illegal immigrants in some parts of the U.S. have also been housed in hotels.
“They put them in like the best hotels anywhere in the world,” he said. “Thousands of dollars a night, and other people are living out in the streets, including our veterans. They can’t get a room.
“There are pictures of our veterans staying right by the door where they’re walking in to live, and the veterans are sitting out in the sidewalk in front of a fancy hotel. And the illegals are coming into that hotel and staying for a week,” he added. “That’s no good.”
In 2023, Fox News reported that claims that homeless veterans were displaced at hotels in upstate New York were false.
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However, that same year in Massachusetts, military families who booked rooms in Foxboro, Massachusetts, the site of the 124th Army-Navy football Game at Gillette Stadium, received cancellation notices from hotels that were being used by the state to house migrants.
In June, the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, which served as one of the main migrant shelters in the city, closed its doors.
The converted site, which has around 1,000 rooms, processed more than 173,000 migrants since its opening in May 2023, the city said.
The hotel was linked to gang activity, and the Justice Department in May launched a probe into the Roosevelt, which is owned by the government of Pakistan, and the Stewart Hotel, which was also transformed into a migrant shelter.
New York City taxpayers have forked out billions of dollars to pay for housing for more than 232,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022.
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