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WH says it has pledged more than $560 million to help cities with migrants

During the White House briefing on Tuesday, Yahoo News Senior White House Correspondent Alexander Nazaryan asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about cities like New York and Chicago that are dealing with migrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration has already announced $200 million to give to cities, and plans to give another $360 million.

Video transcript

- Democratic mayors in Chicago and New York are just straining to house humanely the migrants coming north from Texas primarily. And it seems at least in New York, they've run out of solutions. They seem really desperate. It seems, like Chicago is more or less in the-- more or less in the same boat.

They pleaded for more help from the federal government. What do you have to say to the mayors there?

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: So, look, we just announced very recently over $200 million to support cities this month. And we'll soon be awarding an additional $360 million. So we take this very seriously. And we would, of course, like to be able to provide more than that. But this is something that Congress needs to give it-- to us first to actually deal with that.

But, again, $200 million that we've just announced, another $360 million that we're going to announce additionally to help these cities that you just laid out. But in the meantime, I would note that the number of unlawful border crossing has plummeted since our plan went into full effect just about almost two weeks ago, 10 days ago. And so that's because we put it in plan-- we put a plan in place that dealt with diplomacy, deterrence, and enforcement. That's what we did.

And that's what you're seeing. Once our plan took in effect, you saw you actually saw numbers of unlawful border crossings plummet. And so that is important because the actions that we've put forward is actually working. When it comes to the cities, we're doing everything that we can. Of course, we would want to do more. But we have to have Congress to act as well.