Peter Myers Digest: WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab, RFK Jr’s Campaign Launch brief, Biden’s Illegal Immigrants

(1) Full Transcript: RFK Jr. Presidential Announcement Speech
(2) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Presidential Campaign Launch brief
(3) WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab – to be voted on by World Health Assembly, 21-30 May
(4) Where Did All the Biden Illegal Immigrants Go?

(1) Full Transcript: RFK Jr. Presidential Announcement Speech

For the full transcript, click on the link.

I’m just supplying some excerpts.

yournews.com/2023/04/21/2557368/full-transcript-rfk-jr-presidential-announcement-speech/

Full Transcript: RFK Jr. Presidential Announcement Speech

Apr 21, 2023

[…] History of Governmental Censorship, Lies and How it Rots Society:

And because that is the core. That is the core of this division, of course. When we fight each other. When blacks fight whites and Republicans fight Democrats, rural fights urban. The people, that merger of corporate power that sits at the top is loving the fighting between us and so that they can strip mine our country. And that’s the thing that keeps us—The reason—Truth is, when I was a little boy, nobody in this country would dream that our government would ever lie to the American people. In fact, and that’s not a joke. Nobody believed it back then. In May of 1960, that changed a little when Gary Powers crashes a U-2 in Russia and the Eisenhower administration denied that we had a U-2 program because they didn’t know it. They didn’t know at the time that the Russians had captured Gary Powers. And when the Russians produced him, it was a shock to the American people that their government had lied to them. And then in 1970, during the Vietnam War, of course, we all began to suspect we were being lied to in 71 when the Pentagon Papers came out, we realize, oh, this is what they do. My father, just before he died, very sadly, people in authority lie, and the government now lies to us. We all know it. We take it for granted. When my uncle left office in 19—, when he died in 1963, about 80% of Americans said they trusted their government. Today, 22% trust in the government and 22% trust the press. The lowest level ever. The media is at the lowest ever because we know the media lies to us now and everybody knows that. Problem is—and the problem is that when the sources of information that we’re always used to and that we need to rely on in democracy, and when they start lying to us, Americans look for other sources because they know they’re being lied to and they look for other sources of the truth. And when the media and, you know, the corporate captive media and corporate captive government sees other sources of truth, they have to brand those misinformation because they threaten their paradigm. They threaten that orthodoxy. And of course, there is a lot of genuine misinformation. But as we know, a lot of the misinformation is just statements that depart from government orthodoxy. So, they have to either censor us or they have to lie about what’s true and what’s not true. And that amplifies the polarization. It amplifies the hatred, the fear, the insecurity, because, you know, you’re being lied to and you’re being silenced. Censorship doesn’t work from any point of view, though, and it’s very, very dangerous.

[…] Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. If we want to measure our economy. This is how we ought to be measuring based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community. If, on the other hand, we want to do what the big polluters are urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if it were business and liquidation, and further natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity. We can generate an instantaneous cash flow on the illusion of a prosperous economy, and we can make a few people billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us, but our children are going to pay for our joyride and they’re going to pay for it with denuded landscapes or hills, huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time and they’ll never be able to pay.

[…] Nature is a Social Safety Net that has Provided for us for Generations during Economic Hardships:

Well, I want to say one other thing. You know, nature’s the social safety net. When we had the Great Depression, 10,000 who men lost their jobs, went down to the Hudson River to find oysters and blue crabs and sturgeon and shad and herring ale wives. And they fed themselves and their family and some made money and that was all nature is our social safety net. It’s infrastructure. It can’t do that if there’s another depression. You know, we’re relying on the government to give us money, but it’s that’s not reliable. Nature was always reliable. If you live in a sweltering home in New York, you and you are all you have no access immediately. You can jump on the train, go right up to Croton Point Park and you can visit the river and get away from that for a day. You can experience nature and enrich yourself. You can’t do that if the Hudson is polluted. My job—I have a couple of children of asthma, one out of every four black children, now in urban areas has asthma. The asthma events are triggered by bad air, by ozone or particulates. It’s coming mainly from coal burning power plants. So those plants—General Electric Company privatizes the fish in the Hudson River. They privatize the river to make profits for themselves through corruption as coal generators are privatizing the air and my children’s lungs. And we have to understand that it is an act of theft. Pollution is a subsidy, and it’s an act of theft.

Why Trump should not have Locked Down the Country and what the Corporate Tyranny did to Censor Dissent

I want to move on to another issue that nobody’s going to really want to talk about. But I need you. I’m going to tell you right now, I’m about halfway done with this speech. And this is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years. I got a lot to talk about and they shut me up that long because now I’m going to really let loose on them. So the next 18 months they’re going to hear a lot from me. Oh, and it’s talking about lockdowns. And nobody wants to talk about it. But we need to understand, you know, I grew up at a time most of my life is at a time that economists call the great prosperity. That’s when the American middle class, between 1945 and 75, grew to be the biggest economic engine on the face of the globe. I mean, we were the economy in the globe. We made everything and everybody looked to us not only for goods, but for moral leadership. And we became the most powerful country in the world, unrivaled. And it was because we had a stable democracy with institutions that people trusted, the press that told us the truth and the destruction that, you know, everybody knows it’s an economic and political economic rule. You cannot have democracy in a society where there is high concentrations of wealth and widespread poverty. You need a middle class or you don’t get democracy. And that, that is a law. That is a law. You cannot do it. You cannot do it unless you have a big middle class. And we had that. But since the early 1980s, there’s been a systematic attack on our middle class. And the coup de gras was the lockdown.

The lockdown was the biggest shift in wealth in human history. And I’m going to tell you about that in a second. And I blame President Trump for the lockdown. Now, a lot of people will say a lot of people say President Trump gets blamed for a lot of things that he didn’t do and he gets blamed for some things that he did do. But the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, to our economy, to the middle class in this country, was a lockdown. Now President Trump’s in fairness. Let me just make this point will tell people, well, the lockdown wasn’t my idea. It was—my bureaucrats rolled me on it. I was saying we shouldn’t do it. But that’s not a good enough excuse. You as the president of the United States and as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. On May 2nd, 2020, 600 doctors wrote and signed a letter to President Trump begging him not to allow lockdowns, they said, because at that time, all of the pandemic protocols anywhere in the world, the CDC, everywhere, the European Health Agency, all says you never do mass lockdowns. It causes much worse havoc and deaths and injuries than if you do the standard protocol, which is you lock down the sick, you protect the vulnerable, and you let everybody else go back to work. Otherwise you are going to wreak havoc and of course,—you know, and I wrote I wrote about it for the, you know, on Instagram. I was writing every day. I was citing these economic studies that showed every point—unemployment, you get, you get 37,000 excess deaths from heart attacks, suicides, plus imprisonment. I was writing about this, and they dumped me from the social. They said that’s misinformation. It was not. […]

The Bureaucracy almost Destroying the World and why we Need another Kennedy to Stand Up:

President Trump said, well, these bureaucrats came at him from every side and they were all telling him what he had to do, he had the right instincts. He knew that he shouldn’t close down the country, but he did it. He got rolled by bureaucracy. […]

We’re in constant wars because the military industrial complex, the big contractors own CIA. Now, I want to make this clear. I do not believe that everybody at the CIA is a bad person. My daughter in law, Amaryllis, who is one of the top officers on this campaign and her entire career is a clandestine agent for the CIA as a spy in the weapons of mass destruction programs in some of the most dangerous parts of the earth. And I have never met anybody with such courage. And that’s how most of the 22,000 people at CIA. They’re people who are patriots or people who are good public servants. And they’re people of enormous courage and idealism, as the same with most of our agencies. The problem is the people who end up rising in those agencies generally are people who are in the tank with industry. And that’s how they get corrupted. And one of the things that I can do, I think better than any other political candidate, is I know how to fix something because I’ve spent so much time litigating and studying these agencies. so, I want to talk about one last subject, but let me do two little subjects.

The Drastic Increase in Chronic Disease Especially in Children:

Very quickly, I want to just talk about the chronic disease epidemic, because to me, arguably, this is the worst attack on the middle class in this country. We have the worst health care system in the United States of America. What do I mean by that? I mean that we more on health care by far than any other country, and we have the worst health outcomes. We spend $4.3 trillion annually on health, 4.3 trillion, and about 84% of that goes to treating chronic disease. And why is that? Because America has the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And we didn’t, we didn’t always in 190’s, 50’s and 60’s we had a really healthy population. We had only 6% of our people, of our citizens or children, had chronic disease. In 1988, that became 12.8%. So it doubled. Today, by 2006 it was 54%. We have the sickest generation in American history. We have the sickest children on earth in this country. And by chronic disease, what do I mean? I mean obesity, but more importantly, neurological diseases, neurodevelopmental, A.D.D., ADHD, speech, language ticks, Tourette’s syndrome, ASD, and autism. Autism went from one in every 10,000 people in my generation to one in every 34 kids today. Now, one of the talking points that the industry and their crooked legislative regulators will say is, oh, well, we just started noticing it for the first time. Missing autism is like missing a train wreck. So, it’s an absurd—but more importantly. There is study after study after study that shows that this epidemic is real. It is not the result of changing diagnostic criteria. It is not the result of better recognition. It is an epidemic. […]

Ukraine war, why American Compassion Drives us to Volunteer, but why we should Focus on Ourselves:

Oh, alright. I’m going to talk about one last subject, and it’s a big one. So settle down. I want to talk about the war in Ukraine, and we need to have a national conversation about this war. We need to have a mature—we need to have a mature conversation that allows for nuance and that allows for complexity. And we need to do it respectfully. We can’t be telling one side that they’re Nazis and the other side that they love Putin. Everybody in this country loves our country and we have to respect differences of opinion and we have to respect the people’s capacity to ask questions and, you know, some of the issues that we need to talk about is, numb er one is, is this war in the US national interest? We just need to isolate that question. Is it in the US national interest? And there are, you know, some of the leading angiograms of our most respected people. Of our national diplomats, I’d say Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, Larry Wilkinson, Colin Powell was chief of staff. But they all have said definitively, if you just want to ask, is it in our national interest? It is not. It is not in America’s national interest to push Russia closer to China. That is cataclysmic. Number two, It’s not in our national interest to do something could involve us in a nuclear exchange with a country that has more nuclear weapons and us.

Now, having said that, I want to say that we are in the Ukraine for all the right reasons. We are there because we are a good people. And you know, Abraham Lincoln said America is a great nation because we’re a good nation, and we continue to be a good people. And we are there because of our compassion, the Ukrainian people who have been brutalized who’ve been illegally invaded and have shown extraordinary valor and courage, defending their country and defending, you know, their families and their beliefs and their liberties and their independence, things that Americans have to admire.

My own son, Connor, I’m very, very proud. Connor joined a foreign legion and fought in the Ukraine during the Kharkiv offensive as a machine gunner for a special Forces group. And I think that we need to know as Americans that we have a right to know what is our government’s chief objective in this war. We were told initially that the objective was humanitarian, and that is a good reason to be there, humanitarian. And what that means is trying to end the bloodshed and minimize it as much as possible. In recent times, President Biden’s said that one of our objectives, at least, is regime change of Putin. And this the same strategy that did not work well for us in Iraq. And it’s many of the same people who are around the neo cons, who are around President Biden who have been talking about that for a long time and have been engaged in geopolitical machinations in Ukraine since 2014. And then President Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, validated President Biden’s statement by saying that our objective in the Ukraine is to exhaust and degrade the Russian army so they are incapable of having battles anywhere else in the world. Now and indeed, many of the steps that we’ve taken in the Ukraine have seemed to indicate that our interest is in prolonging the war rather than shortening it. So, if those are our objectives to have regime change and exhaust the Russians, that is completely antithetical to a humanitarian mission. It’s we’re there for a humanitarian mission. It means to reduce bloodshed and bring an end to the war quickly. If we’re there to exhaust the Russians or regime change, then doesn’t mean that the Ukraine is just a pawn in a geopolitical battle between two great superpowers, and that our strategy is to is to put the flower of Ukrainian youth into an avatar of death in order to exhaust Russia.

And if that’s true, then we need to know about it. If it’s not true, then we need a pretty good discussion with the President and the secretary of defense and others to tell us exactly what are we doing there and how—

Foreign Policy and its Cost:

I want to talk just a little about some of the costs of the war. We’ve now committed $113 billion to the Ukraine. For reference, the entire budget of EPA is 12 billion. The budget of CDC is 11 billion. We have 57% of Americans. We have a crisis here. We have a war on the poor. 57% of Americans cannot put their hand on $1,000 if they had an emergency. One quarter of Americans go to bed hungry. We have 1.5 million veterans who are living below the poverty line. We have 33,000 veterans who are homeless we have 27 veterans, 23 veterans a day who are killing themselves. […]

George W. Bush has that same problem. George W. Bush says the worst mistake he made as president was listening to CIA Director George Tenet tell him it was a slam dunk that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And so, the neocons and CIA had to go into Iraq and throw out and do regime change. And we got not now we spent $8 trillion. And what do we get for that 8 trillion? Nothing worse than nothing. Iraq is now much worse off than it was when we went in there.

We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did. We may have killed a million Iraqis and nobody knows the number. It is. It is an incoherent country today where Shia death squads or fighting with Sunni death squads in the street. The government is corrupt, the police are corrupt. We created ISIS. We drove 2 million up into Europe, a deep, destabilized democracy for a generation in Europe, they caused Brexit.

This is the cost of the Iraq war, $8 trillion there, 16 trillion for the lockdowns, 24 trillion. Nothing to show except a devastated middle class in the United States of America. And we need to put an end to that. Our strategy in this country has been to use military weapons to project power, military force, to project power around the world. And that’s how, you know, our strategy to control the world. The Chinese did something different. They adopted my uncle’s philosophy and strategy, which is—we were spending 8 trillion I mean, bridges, ports, roads and hospitals. They were spending 8 trillion building bridges, roads ports and hospitals. And they are now displacing us as trade partners, most the African nations and Latin America. Brazil just switched to Chinese currency away from the dollar. Saudi Arabia just switched away from the dollar. […]

Preparing for the Presidency:

And in many ways, I have spent my lifetime preparing for this office because I’ve spent so much time suing these agencies. I know the agencies. I know you know how NIH works, how the CDC works, how FDA works, EPA. And Michael (inaudible) sitting here in the front row is my law partner who was one of the lead attorneys with Brent Wisner, you know, on our Monsanto case. When we got the Monsanto papers, we realized that we found emails that showed that the head of the pesticide division of the EPA was secretly working for Monsanto for forever. And, and, and that’s true in all of these agencies and most politicians, when they come in, they want to, you know, they sincerely want to fix the agencies. They want fix the government, they want to drain the swamp, but get in there, and they don’t they don’t know what to do with these sprawling bureaucracies, 30 or 40 people with their own culture and their own history. And people have been there forever. And it’s really hard for them to change that. So rather than do that, they concentrate on another agenda, and they put somebody safe to run that agency. You know. President Trump Right brought Scott Godley then— Trump took $1,000,000 from Pfizer and then appointed a guy who essentially was a Pfizer lobbyist—he was a business partner of Pfizer to run the agency. And he, of course, made $88 billion for Pfizer on one vaccine. And then left to join Pfizer’s board. That’s not draining the swamp. That is the swamp. An, you know, President Biden is the same thing. […]

And most of these people go in because they’re safe and they’re going to be good on the talk shows on Sunday morning, but they don’t really want to go in and they don’t know how to go in and really make big changes in those agencies that can make waves and maybe cause problems with the President. So they get somebody safe. Ralph Reed used to describe those people. He said they were people who get the joke. And I, I you know, I get the joke, but I don’t think it’s funny. And I’m not safe now. I am not safe. The vested interest. I’m not safe. My job is to keep you safe. And that’s what I am going to do.. […]

(2) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Presidential Campaign Launch brief

From: Leland Lehrman <rll@fund-balance.com>
Subject: If you weren’t there : How to get up to speed – An RFK Jr. Presidential Campaign Launch brief

*If you weren’t there: How to get up to speed – A Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Presidential Campaign Launch brief*

Yes, it was awesome. Yes I will chronicle the myth for the Gods, but for now, if you want to quickly get up to speed, there are four major pieces worth your time:

1. The reel: two and half minutes of inspiration: https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1649190840198209537

2. The announcement speech: over two hours of inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLrVWmt_33g

3. Fox News interview with Neil Cavuto: twenty six minutes of well played back and forth with tough questions and detailed answers:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-f-kennedy-jr-argues-american-middle-class-systematically-wiped-covid-19-lockdowns

4. Tucker Carlson interview: 1.5M views, 45K thumbs up, five and half minutes of a fair “hearing”:

The Republican nomination remains of interest, but I will be supporting Bobby.

R. Leland Lehrman

<https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1649190840198209537>

(3) WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab – to be voted on by World Health Assembly, 21-30 May

WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab: Beware of the New International Health Regulation and Pandemic Treaty, a Health Tyranny Never Heard of Before in Human History

WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab: Beware of the New International Health Regulation and Pandemic Treaty, a Health Tyranny Never Heard of Before in Human History

Last call to the world to stop WHO from putting humanity into an Open Prison

By Peter Koenig

Global Research, April 23, 2023

The new IHR and the Pandemic Treaty would be transferring the authority to decide what is a pandemic and what deserves the status of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and literally how any matters of health ought to be treated – a limitless mandate of dictates – to the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO Director General may call an outright prohibition with punishment on using “WHO-banned” medication, even though proven effective. This is precisely what happened during COVID. Medical doctors and pharmacies were not allowed to prescribe, recommend, and sell medication that was effective against COVID, because WHO prohibited to do so.

This WHO power would be expanded as an International Law, or rather as a “rules-based order”, the new tyrannical term chosen by the elite, to circumvent literally any national and international laws.

Both the IHR and the Pandemic Treaty will be voted on by the upcoming World Health Assembly, from 21-30 May 2023. The vote is planned on 24 May 2023. A two-thirds majority is needed by the 194-member delegates to pass.

See this 20-min video of Mr. Andrew Bridgen, UK Member of Parliament, explaining to the UK Parliament why the new WHO IHR and Pandemic Treaty must be voted against.

This universal authority over world health issues would rest solely in the hands of a non- medical doctor, nor health scientist, Bill Gates-implanted WHO General Director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was previously a Board member of GAVI, the Vaccination Alliance and close partner of WHOs. GAVI is a creation of and funded by Bill Gates.

WHO is registered as a UN agency, which it is not really. WHO was created in 1948 at the behest of David Rockefeller (1915 – 2017), a known eugenist and globalist, to control the world population’s “health” – and death.

WHO has full immunity from criminal prosecution, and its senior employees have diplomatic and tax-free status in Switzerland.

WHO is more than 80% funded by private sources, mostly from the pharmaceuticals industry, the Gates Foundation, and other private sponsors. WHO is clearly working for the interests of its donors, mostly the pharmaceuticals and Bill Gates, also an eugenist – not for the people.

We have seen how badly – or better, criminally – WHO has handled COVID since the beginning of 2020, with worldwide lockdowns, social distancing, tremendous fear-mongering, destroying economies, people’s livelihoods, and causing death, not by COVID but by fear-induced diseases, depression and misery, for a disease which at the worst is very similar to the annual flu. And for a virus that to this date has NEVER been isolated.

And later, in December 2020, by imposing and coercing every government in the world to force its people to get injected with what they called a vaccine, a gene-modifying trial vaxx of the mRNA-type, never tested before. People were threatened and lost their jobs, were banned from public places – and much worse – if they would not submit to the untested, dangerous and even deadly vaxxes.

According to WHO’s orders, COVID hit the entire world, all its 194 member states at once, thus, justifying declaring on 16 March 2020 general lockdowns around the globe. This is an absolute impossibility. Even if a virus would exist – let me repeat, the COVID “virus” was NEVER isolated – a virus does not hit the entire globe at the same time.

As of March 16, 2020, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (JHSPH) reports 179,165 confirmed “COVID cases” in 155 countries, with 7,081 deaths. The JHSPH is largely financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These figures, even if they were true, would be far from justifying a global lockdown.

Already on 30 January 2020 WHO declared COVID a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Coincidentally, The World Economic Forum (WEF), infamous Davos meeting took place from 21-24 January 2020. WHO’s DG Tedros, Gates, the world’s power brokers and power structure, Big Pharma, Big Finance, most UN and other international organization were present at the 2020 WEF, when the pandemic decision, with global lockdowns, mask-wearing and all the social humiliating measures and dictates were decided.

These “decisions” were following a desk top dry-run called Event 201, simulating a “corona” virus, where also all the international, financial and pharma key players were present, on 18 October 2019 in NYC, barely three months before the infamous and unreal “outbreak” took place.

The powers behind the WEF put WHO in charge of committing this colossal, never-before witnessed crime on humanity, a “corona” virus, later called by WHO’s DG Tedros COVID-19.

This background on WHO’s COVID crime on humanity is just a forerunner to what may follow if the new International Health Regulation (IHR) and the intimately related Pandemic Treaty were to pass the World Health Assembly’s vote on 24 May 2023. It would take a two-thirds majority to be ratified.

If accepted, the new IHR and Pandemic Treaty would become law to be enforced by each and every country by WHO in 2024.

If approved, the members of WHO would just have passed a ”rule” eliminating a key human right, peoples right to decide over their bodies.

There is not much time to lobby against this “rule-based order”. Do whatever you can to have your government vote against this tyrannical power grab — which would put humanity into a worldwide open air Health Prison.

If the new IHR and Pandemic Treaty are approved, We, the People, must take the necessary action and massively, in an organized and peaceful fashion, but relentlessly and decisively requesting our governments to Exit WHO, with immediate effect.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

(4) Where Did All the Biden Illegal Immigrants Go?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/04/20/where_did_all_the_biden_illegal_immigrants_go_hard-up_sanctuary_cities_like_new_york_are_only_part_of_the_answer_894505.html

https://www.theepochtimes.com/where-did-all-the-biden-illegal-immigrants-go-hard-up-sanctuary-cities-are-only-part-of-the-answer_5212981.html

Where Did All the Biden Illegal Immigrants Go? Hard-Up Sanctuary Cities Are Only Part of the Answer

By James Varney and RealClearInvestigations

April 21, 2023 Updated: April 24, 2023

In New York City, if the newcomers aren’t put up at the luxury cruise terminal that served the QE2, they could get $700-a-night midtown hotel accommodations with iconic Manhattan views. In Chicago, they found themselves whisked to suburban lodgings. In Denver, officials refer to them discreetly as “guests” and you needn’t bother inquiring about their inns or addresses.

The people enjoying these free digs aren’t privacy-conscious jet-setters, but the secrecy surrounding them might be comparable: They’re some of the millions of migrants who have illegally crossed into the United States since the Biden administration relaxed most border controls.

No one knows exactly how many people have poured across the southwestern U.S. border since President Biden took office, or where they’ve gone since. The <https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters>official number of encounters by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) stands at 5.2 million people, logged over the last two full federal fiscal years and fiscal 2023 through March. But that number is imprecise because it includes repeat encounters with the same people and omits the many who slipped into the country unnoticed by border agents.

Under President Biden, the United States smashed past the 200,000 monthly encounters mark for the first time in July 2021 and it has repeatedly topped that record in the months since. By comparison, in fiscal 2020, which ended a month before Biden’s defeat of President Trump, the United States averaged 38,174 monthly encounters at the border, according to CBP figures.

Because of an official lack of transparency, all those people and the circumstances by which they have arrived and remained have made it hard to take stock of the historic influx. Through midnight flights and buses from the border to far-flung locales, the administration has made it difficult to identify where the migrants are now living and receiving services. Also unclear are the costs associated with the arrivals.

But flares have been sent up—especially over immigrant sanctuary cities like New York, Denver, and Chicago, which have long promised to house migrants. While those cities are providing housing and other services for a small fraction of the recent migrants, the costs are significant for these budget-strapped metropolises.

Denver plans to spend >$20 million in the first six months of this year to provide housing to migrants. Officials say this works out to between $800 and $1,000 per week per person.

In January the state of Illinois turned down Chicago’s request for more funds, saying it had already spent close to $120 million on its “asylum seeker emergency response”—or roughly $33,000 per migrant.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has asked for more than $500 million in federal aid, while pegging the city’s spending at between $2 billion and $3 billion.

Other data points of the opaque costs of Biden-era illegal immigration include Massachusetts’ estimate that it will need $28 million to launch a program to provide driver’s licenses to undocumented residents. The state is seeking a share of the omnibus spending bill passed by Democrats in December 2022 when they controlled both houses of Congress, which included $800 million for cities grappling with the influx. …