Ecuadorians fill Hennepin County homeless shelters
The Minneapolis Star Tribune committed an act of journalism this week with Maya Rao‘s lengthy piece on the growing migrant crisis in the state’s largest county.
Scott Johnson at PowerLine writes about the many important questions that are not asked or answered in Rao’s piece. Fair enough.
But the facts that Rao assembles in her piece and accompanying Twitter (X) thread are amazing.
A sampling:
- Migrants in New York are given “free” plane tickets to Minneapolis
- Hennepin County has a “shelter all” policy for families
- Minnesota’s immigration court has 7,779 pending cases involving Ecuadorians
- One in three homeless families are recent migrants
- The county is spending $27 million a year housing homeless families
- Minnesota’s generosity is known as far south as the Darien Gap in Panama
- Homeless shelters are actually repurposed hotels
- The county feeds migrant families three meals/day
- There is no time limit on county support for migrants
It’s worth your time to read the whole thing.
The shelter-all policy has been the undoing of New York and the reason why the city is offering “free” one-way plane tickets to migrants. New York City has seen more than 120,000 migrants arrive in the past year.
Rao’s article also mentions Ecuadorians arriving in Minnesota via Philadelphia and Chicago, cities with their own growing migrant crises.
So what’s going on in Ecuador? Reports indicate that more than 100,000 people from the South American country have crossed our southern border in the past year. The exodus from Ecuador is driven, in part, by the massive influx into Ecuador by people fleeing Columbia and Venezuela.
Political instability, fueled by drug wars, saw a presidential candidate assassinated in August. Earlier this month, Ecuador elected a young, centrist/right-leaning presidential candidate vowing to stem the violence.
Something’s gotta give.