From New Hampshire to national polling, voters are sounding the alarm that they consider the record-setting immigrant influx the nation’s most pressing crisis as 2024 transitions into the general election. Yet the obvious came as a surprise to the mean girls of MSNBC.
Evidently, the former White House press secretary does not know her neighbors well and certainly does not go out of her way to meet those less fortunate. Jen Psaki lives in the tony northern Virginia town of Arlington in a neighborhood where houses average north of $2 million, and while working for President Joe Biden, presumably commuted to downtown Washington. And yet, she somehow believes fellow Virginians’ panic over the immigrant crisis is outrageous when, in reality, it is anything but.
The border debacle has already cost lives in this area in the most dramatic and drastic of ways. A Maryland 2-year-old was murdered by an illegal immigrant mere miles from Psaki’s manor, and a Venezuelan illegal immigrant was arrested last month for sexually assaulting a minor. But in much more banal and omnipresent ways, the immigrant crisis is inescapable in Washington and its surroundings.
The most obvious epicenter of Washington’s immigrant crisis is the Clean and Sober Streets center right off the Capitol exit of the I-395, about three stops south of the White House on the red line and a glaring morass of homeless camps mixed with immigrants outside the shelter and the Mitch Snyder Art and Education Center. One of the greatest drains on Washington’s public services and private philanthropy for the area’s chronically homeless is indeed the immigrant crisis, something Psaki would learn, as I did, from just 30 minutes of volunteering on the streets.
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While some immigrants initially bused into the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area by red-state governors like Texas’s Greg Abbott were put up in hotels, much of the aid has fallen on private charities and nonprofit groups such as my church. The current point of contact for the hundreds of immigrant buses is not the local or federal government but SAMU First Response. The district’s Department of Human Services stopped housing immigrants upon reaching capacity late last year, leading plenty of immigrants to loiter outside shelters, such as those on D Street NW, but also under freeway overpasses and in public parks. Washington announced it spent nearly $40 million on immigrant services through the end of last August. There’s no tally of total money, minutes volunteered, or services donated from private philanthropy, but again, take 30 minutes volunteering with any local church, and Psaki could see the carnage for herself.
Of course, the crisis has trickled across the Potomac in the form of increased homelessness and diverted resources, such as dormitories newly reserved for immigrants. However, holed up in her multimillion-dollar mansion, Psaki doesn’t have to hear or see all that.