Source: Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty
A controversial immigrant voucher program, according to city officials New York receiving food using debit cards ends.
New York was announced that he would end a program that gave immigrants food stamps to pay for food, ending an initiative that had long been attacked by conservatives and related experts. Vouchers were in the form of prepaid debit cards. “As we move toward more competitive contracts for asylum seeker programs, we have chosen not to renew the emergency contract for this pilot program once the one-year term has ended,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.
The program, which began in late March, provided debit cards for food and baby supplies to 2,600 migrants who arrived in the city and stayed in city-funded hotels. Debit cards could only be used in convenience stores, bodegas and supermarkets. They would be useless in other businesses. Mobility Capital Finance, or MoCaFi, was the private company that won a no-bid contingency contract for $400,000 to run the program for one year.
The program distributed the cards at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan to participants, totaling $3.2 million. It was a big change from a previous food distribution system run by another private medical company, DocGo, which received a $432 million contract from the city before alarming complaints forced the city to phase out the contract.
Conservatives have attacked the program since its inception, claiming it was ripe for fraud, but there have been no instances of bad behavior with the debit cards. City Auditor Brad Lander also previously revoked the city's ability to enter into emergency agreements for immigrant services. While an estimated 700 immigrants enter New York each week seeking asylum, 1,000 leave. Adams Mayor William Fowler, City Hall spokesman, said Mayor Adams is open to potentially pursuing the future installation of a similar program. “We will continue to implement and learn from innovative pilot programs, such as the direct response card program, as we care for hundreds of new arrivals each week,” he said in an interview.
