Since April 2022, more than 223,000 migrants have arrived in New York City. The cost to taxpayers has been staggering: approximately $6.1 billion in fiscal year 2024 alone, with total projected costs exceeding $12 billion over nearly three years. In Chicago, spending has reached at least $300 million, with NBC Chicago’s investigation finding that the city had obscured substantial spending details. These are not numbers drawn from partisan talking points. They are figures compiled by city comptrollers, auditors, and the municipalities themselves. And buried within them is a story that has received far less attention than it deserves: the emergence of a class of private contractors who have turned the migrant crisis into an extraordinarily profitable business.
New York City’s approach to the crisis has relied heavily on no-bid emergency contracts — procurement mechanisms designed for genuine emergencies that bypass the competitive bidding process intended to protect taxpayers. In January 2025, the city announced a $991 million no-bid contract with the Hotel Association of New York City Foundation, covering 14,000 hotel rooms for migrant shelters. The original contract had been $237.3 million; it was subsequently boosted to nearly a billion dollars despite a declining shelter population. The cost to house migrants reached $352 per night per household, including a $130 fee to hotels for room rental alone.
The DocGo Debacle
The most scrutinized contract has been the $432 million no-bid emergency agreement with DocGo, operating through its subsidiary Rapid Reliable Testing NY LLC. Entered in May 2023, the contract was intended to provide housing and services for migrants at hotels throughout the city. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander’s August 2024 audit of the contract revealed a pattern of waste and mismanagement that would be remarkable even by the standards of municipal government. The city paid $2 million for empty hotel rooms designated for migrants who never arrived. Approximately $11 million in unsupported costs were identified in initial invoice reviews. The Housing Preservation and Development department paid DocGo $13.8 million for costs incurred in May and June 2023 alone, with what the comptroller characterized as inadequate oversight. DocGo had failed to conduct hotel inspections, reconcile invoices, or establish basic cost assessment mechanisms.
The pattern extends beyond New York. In Chicago, the Inn of Chicago hotel billed $344,626 per week for 1,500 beds. The state of Illinois modified a contract with Favorite Healthcare Staffing, adding $30 million in 2024. Perhaps most remarkably, the state agreed to pay $1.3 million for a migrant tent encampment that was never built, even after Governor J.B. Pritzker halted the project in June 2025. The money, once committed through the contracting process, proved nearly impossible to claw back.
The Accountability Gap
The emergency procurement framework that enabled these contracts was designed for natural disasters and unforeseen crises — events that are, by definition, temporary. But the migrant crisis in sanctuary cities has become a permanent condition, and the emergency contracting powers have become a permanent feature of municipal governance. This creates an environment uniquely hospitable to waste, favoritism, and outright fraud. Without competitive bidding, there is no market mechanism to discipline pricing. Without the transparency requirements that accompany standard procurement, there is limited public visibility into how funds are spent. And without the accountability structures built into normal contracting processes, there are few consequences for underperformance.
New York City purchased more than 47,000 tickets to help migrants reach preferred destinations elsewhere in the country — an expenditure that implicitly acknowledges the city’s inability to absorb the population it publicly committed to welcoming. The political leadership of both New York and Chicago championed sanctuary city policies as moral imperatives, positioning themselves as humanitarian alternatives to federal immigration enforcement. What they did not anticipate — or did not care to plan for — was the fiscal reality of those commitments. The result has been an ad hoc response that prioritizes the appearance of compassion over the responsible stewardship of public funds.
The migrant crisis is, at its core, a failure of federal immigration policy, and no municipal government should bear sole responsibility for addressing it. But the manner in which New York and Chicago have responded — with billion-dollar no-bid contracts, minimal oversight, and a contracting ecosystem that enriches private operators while delivering questionable services — represents a distinct and avoidable failure of local governance. The contractors who have profited from this chaos did not create the crisis. But they have been its most reliable beneficiaries, and the taxpayers of America’s largest cities deserve to know exactly where their money has gone.