Federal Lawsuit Shows How $100 Million Was Spent To Feed and House Migrants at New York City

A conservative legal and media nonprofit organization, Judicial Watch, has obtained documents that show how New York City officials burned through more than $100 million in federal emergency funds to pay for food and housing for migrants during the Biden administration.Judicial Watch says it received 710 pages of records from the Department of Homeland Security after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The documents show how the city spent Federal Emergency Management Agency funds in a 14-month period.The spending came as the Republican governors of Florida and Texas sent tens of thousands of migrants to the city on buses and planes, while many more made their way to the city independently. The crisis led the mayor at the time, Eric Adams, to declare a state of emergency and called for urgent aid from the federal and state governments to deal with a wave of migrants that overwhelmed the city’s shelter system.The city expected to spend at least $1 billion by the end of the 2022-2023 fiscal year on the crisis.Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in May 2025 after it said FEMA failed to respond to a request for records of payments and funding allocations, internal communications and directives, as well as policy and procedural guidelines.The documents show New York City received $188 million in federal funding from a federal Shelter and Services Program, a federal grant program administered by FEMA in coordination with the Customs and Border Protection agency, which also is part of Homeland Security.Federal funds were spent on around-the-clock security staffing at a Manhattan office building that was converted to be used as a migrant shelter, and on daily meal delivery to migrants housed at 33 New York City hotels.The records show a security company billed the city more than $47,000 a day for security services at a single midtown Manhattan building. Two invoices totaled approximately $3 million for two months of services.Another document shows a food services company charged the city more than $583,000 for a single week of breakfast, lunch, and dinner deliveries to hotel and shelter sites spread across the city.A Long Island City food service commissary billed more than $1.2 million at an unidentified shelter site between March 2023 and May 2024. Judicial Watch said all descriptions, quantities and prices were redacted, along with the identity of the customer and the delivery site. That made it impossible to determine what was delivered, to whom, or at what per-meal cost. The largest single invoice was more than $468,000 for 14 days in October 2023.“We have the receipts — millions in taxpayer dollars were used by the Biden administration to provide virtually unlimited free housing and food to countless illegal aliens in New York City,” the president of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, said in a release.A request for comment was not immediately returned by either FEMA or the New York City’s mayor’s office.FEMA said last February that it was suspending payments sent to New York City to house migrants after Elon Musk — who was heading up the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, at the time — blasted the amount of FEMA money being spent on hotel rooms for migrants in the city.“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” Mr. Musk said in a February 10, 2025 X post.A request for comment was not immediately returned by either FEMA or the New York City’s mayor’s office.

Federal Lawsuit Shows How $100 Million Was Spent To Feed and House Migrants at New York City

Federal Lawsuit Shows How $100 Million Was Spent To Feed and House Migrants at New York City

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