Democrats love them some illegal aliens. They love them more than they love you, and it’s getting to the point where they have no problem telling you that to your face, all while they expect you to pay for these alien freeloaders.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul stood at a press conference in Manhattan alongside socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Attorney General Letitia James — the trifecta of New York hard-left governance — and announced she is spending $7.25 million in state taxpayer money to cover legal representation for approximately 1,400 migrant children in deportation proceedings.
When a reporter posted about it on social media, Hochul’s response was two words: “Damn right I did.” Four words that tell you everything about how New York’s Democratic leadership thinks about its own citizens versus the people who entered the country illegally.
The funding fills a gap created when the Trump administration allowed its contract with roughly 100 legal-aid providers serving migrant children nationwide to lapse in July. The federal government made a decision. New York’s governor immediately reached into the state treasury — into money collected from New York workers, families, and businesses — and replaced it. No debate. No legislative vote. “Damn right.”
The casual confidence of that response is the part worth sitting with. Hochul isn’t defensive about spending New York taxpayer money on legal representation for people who have no legal right to be in the country, children or not. She’s proud of it. She’s bragging about it. She put it on official government social media like it’s a bumper sticker.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 — a Bush-era program — requires that illegal alien minors receive legal representation at deportation hearings. This is existing federal law. New York has now committed an additional $7.25 million of state money on top of whatever federal legal aid remains in place.
The obvious question, asked by every American watching their own legal costs, their own children’s school budgets, their own infrastructure crumbling: when does the state spend $7 million to help American citizens navigate a legal system that is also complex, also expensive, and also produces consequences that can ruin lives?
The question answers itself. The state spends money on illegal alien legal defense because it’s a political statement — a signal to the activist base that New York will resist federal immigration enforcement using every dollar it can find. The signal matters more than the math.
This is the same Biden-era ORR that lost track of 320,000 migrant children under its supervision. Some of those children ended up trafficked. Some ended up in forced labor. The administration that oversaw that catastrophic failure is the same one Democrats are now funding retroactively — providing legal representation in deportation proceedings for children that the federal government already demonstrated it couldn’t protect when they were in its custody.
“Damn right I did.” What hubris. What arrogance. What lack of self-awareness. And New Yorkers are paying. New Yorkers should know it — and ask themselves, on November’s ballot, whether their governor is spending their money for them or against them.
