VIDEO: Influx of migrants at DNC didn't materialize, but taxpayer costs persist

(The Center Square) – The influx of non-citizen migrants being transported from the southern U.S. border to Chicago during the Democratic National Convention didn’t seem to materialize, but the concerns of the ongoing taxpayer costs persists.

At last month’s Republican National Convention, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Chicago to expect more migrants. Such headlines didn’t materialize this week. Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza said that’s because of the Biden-Harris administration tightening up the border.

“Short of them going to knock on doors and find migrants and then bus them over here, their threat, you know, fell on deaf ears here,” Mendoza said during the Illinois delegation’s breakfast Thursday morning.

Regardless, more than 45,000 non-citizen migrants have been transported to Chicago from border communities inundated with border crossers over the last two years during the Biden-Harris administration. More than 12.5 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the border since Presidet Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021.

Leslie Collazo, a Chicago Republican running for the statehouse, said voters she’s talking to feel betrayed by Chicago being a “sanctuary city.”

“Because they feel that a lot of the resources that could have come to them as American citizens are now being allocated to kids and families that have crossed at the southern border,” Collazo told The Center Square.

Illinois law prohibits local law enforcement from working with federal immigration officials to enforce immigration law.

“So they feel really betrayed by that and they’re speaking up and they’re super frustrated so those are the conversations that I’m having,” Collazo said. “I walked away from the Democratic party in 2020 because it was a little too far to the left, so I’m here with all of the middleground folks going ‘we’ve got to make some changes here.’”

Despite for more than three years the border seeing millions of illegal crossings, Mendoza said it was the Biden-Harris administration that stemmed the flow. She advocated for amnesty.

“You process them, you give them a workers permit and let them earn and provide money to the tax base instead of taking from it,” she said, urging people to vote Democrat if they want to solve the issue.

Illinois taxpayers have paid more than a billion dollars for non-citizen health care, housing, food and education in the past two years with hundreds of millions of dollars more expected.

Former President Donald Trump has criticized Harris for the Biden-Harris administration's handling of the southern U.S. border, noting illegal crossing exploded once Biden took office. Trump said starting Day 1, if he's elected for a second term, he'll begin "the largest mass deportation in U.S. history," starting with violent criminal illegal aliens.