Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

‘We Don’t Know If We Get Rapists’: Grandmother Rips Decision To House Migrants In School Gym

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A grandmother ripped New York City during a Wednesday interview over the city’s decision to use school gyms to house migrants.

“We’re scared. We don’t know and we don’t have no concrete answers if these people have been in the process of being — if they checked the backgrounds,” Rosie Velez told Fox News reporter Nate Foy. “We don’t know if we get rapists, criminals, killers, we don’t know anything. So we want to make sure of that.”

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Students and parents protested the decision by city officials to use gyms to house migrants heading to New York City, which reportedly is considering the use of a many as 20 such facilities across the five boroughs of the city. The city is expecting as many as 10,000 migrants, according to ABC 7.

The Biden administration allowed Title 42 to lapse at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. Over 1.2 million illegal immigrants have been encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border during fiscal year 2023, according to data released by United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), following 2,378,944 encounters in fiscal year 2022 and 1,734,686 in fiscal year 2021, while Fox News reported that 600,000 migrants evaded CBP in fiscal year 2022.

“At this moment, there’s parents that I have spoken to and me as — as a grandmother, we have decided, our children are not coming to school. We leave them at home,” Velez told Foy. “Even though the last time we were told that if the children are absent — if we don’t bring them to school, they’re going to be considered absent.”

“This is not our decision,” Velez continued. “This was the New York City Department of Education and city agencies that they took this decision to bring these migrants here without talking to the parents. It was a big surprise. The letter that we received, it states that they had made the decision.”