Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party last December, had harsh words for the leading members of her former political party for giving three times more money to the state of New York than to Arizona to alleviate the immigration crisis.
In an extensive interview with Politico, Sinema especially lambasted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), whom she accused of giving more money to New York state than to the border states to combat the immigrant crisis.
Sinema’s criticism comes after Schumer and Jeffries boasted in June of getting $104.6 million for New York from an $800 million grant from the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website, they only awarded Arizona organizations $23,890,395 in the same month through its Shelter and Services Program. Sinema did not hold back anything from this fact, arguing that the discrepancy “is fairly obvious.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the announcement about the $104 million was made first, in a joint Schumer and Jeffries press release, not from the White House or FEMA,” Sinema told Politico.
“The first news of it broke by their press release. Now, how did that happen?” she added sarcastically.
The senator, now an Independent, said during the interview that she followed up on grants with Biden administration officials and told them that her decision to give more money to New York than to states like Arizona was “deeply, deeply wrong.”
Sinema doesn’t mince words
According to the New York Post, it is not the first time that Sinema has lashed out at Democrats for the discrepancy in the total grants given to the states.
At an Aug. 2 roundtable in Yuma, Sinema told an attendee her thoughts on why more money went to New York than Arizona.
“The reason the money is going to New York is because the Speaker of the House is from New York, and the leader of the United States Senate is from New York,” the senator said. “That is how a bunch of money went to New York.”
“The money was intended, and there’s language that was put in in the law that said it should be going for decompression at the border,” Sinema added. “The fact that a yeoman’s amount of this money went to New York City, in my opinion, is wrong because they are not a border state and they are not facing the kind of pressure that we are facing here.”
