NY homeless vets receive cold boot as state makes room for more migrants

**UPDATE** After publication of this post, it was reported that the claims about the veterans made by the group were not true. The latest post with details can be found here.

Homeless veterans are reportedly being booted from hotels in New York to make room for incoming migrants.

“The ex-military — including a 24-year-old man in desperate need of help after serving in Afghanistan — were told by the hotels at the beginning of the week that their temporary housing was getting pulled out from under them at the establishments and that they’d have to move on to another spot,” the New York Post reported Friday.

The Post was tipped off about this by the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, a group that “help[s] homeless and low-income military service veterans in need of living assistance.”

“Our veterans have been placed in another hotel due to what’s going on with the immigrants,” the foundation’s CEO, disabled military veteran Sharon Toney-Finch, told the Post.

“One of the vets called me on Sunday. He told me he had to leave because the hotel said the extended stay is not available. Then I got another call. We didn’t waste any time. That’s when we started on Monday to organize when and where to move them all,” she added.

According to Toney-Finch, 15 homeless veterans were booted this week from the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh, which is roughly 60 miles north of New York City.

Another five were booted from the Super 8 and Hampton Inn & Suites in Middletown.

“She said the hotels didn’t explicitly say the vets had to move because of the migrants but that it was clear to her that was the case, given the timing. All 20 of the booted veterans have ended up at a Hudson Valley hotel about 20 minutes away, said Toney-Finch, who asked that The Post not name the site,” according to the Post.

She also said the homeless veterans had originally been slated to remain at the three hotels (Crossroads, Super 8, Hampton Inn & Suites) for four weeks, up until permanent housing for them was procured. But instead they wound up only making it two weeks before being booted.

“Now we have to work from ground zero. We just lost that trust [with the vets],” she said.

Some local politicians have taken note of what’s occurring. Take New York Assemblyman Brian Maher, a Republican.

“Shining a light on this is important because we need to make sure these hotels know how important it is to respect the service of our veterans before they kick [them] out of hotels to make room. They really ought to think about the impact on these people already going through a traumatic time,” he told The Post.

“Whether you agree with asylum-seekers being here or not, we can’t just ignore these veterans that are in our charge that we are supposed to protect: the New Yorkers and Americans. We need to put them first. For these people only being there a few weeks, then to be told after having a level of trust developed, ‘Hey, you have to get out,’ That’s not right,’’ he added.

Bingo.

As for why hotels are abandoning homeless veterans in favor of migrants, Toney-Finch believes it’s all about the money.

“They want to get paid [more]. That’s so unfair, because at the end of the day, we are a small nonprofit, and we do pay $88 a day for a veteran to be there,” she said.

“While it’s unclear what the city is paying upstate, various reported deals between the Big Apple and Manhattan hotels have called for payments such as $190 a night — part of an estimated $4.3 billion migrant price tag for taxpayers through spring 2024,” the Post notes.

All this comes as the border is being flooded thanks to the revocation of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that’d allowed U.S. authorities to quickly expel migrants at the border. This isn’t to say the border wasn’t already being overrun.

In fact, it was already being so overrun that border cities and states had been forced to start shipping some of the migrants up north to blue metropolitan citiies like Chicago and New York City, among others.

It was this much-needed shipping of migrants that triggered a humanitarian crisis that has left blue cities like NYC at a loss.

Border state legislators have nevertheless staunchly defended the shipping of migrants, arguing that it’s everybody’s responsibility to help with the border crisis that the current Democrat administration in the White House has created.

Vivek Saxena

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