Hotels involved in the resettlement of illegal immigrants are making lots of money through New York City’s shelter program, a former hotel worker said Monday on Fox News Channel.

The average cost of a hotel room jumped from $277.92 in 2022 to $301.61 in 2023, and more than 130 hotels have joined the city’s shelter program by opening their doors to migrants, The New York Times reported. The shelter program is seen as a factor in the shortage of hotel rooms for tourists and other travelers, and Carlos Arellano, the former hotel worker, said owners are “loving this because the money is just going around and around.”

“When you walk into hotels to work at them, the main hotel staff is not doing anything, they are standing around, but yet they still charge the city for any little thing they can,” Arellano told “Fox and Friends” guest host Rachel Campos-Duffy. “And when you see 10 workers on the first floor of the lobby of the hotel, only two of them are really working. Meanwhile, the hotel will still be charging the city for all 10 staff members. And you really don’t know what’s going on in there until you work in one of these places, but the costs just keep being driven up by the hotels.”

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“I like to tell people when you see someone, like a politician on the news, saying, ‘Oh, we regret this, we wish this wasn’t happening,’ it’s all lies,” Arellano continued. “Everything from the politicians to the owners of the hotels, everybody is loving this because the money is just going around and around.”

The hotels receive anywhere from $139 to $185 per room per night for sheltering migrants, whether or not the rooms are occupied, according to the Times. Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, announced budget cuts in November, including closing libraries on Sundays and freezing hiring for the New York Police Department, as part of efforts to address the costs of housing migrants arriving in the city.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that the Border Patrol had 1.6 million encounters with illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2021, 2.2 million in fiscal 2022, and 2 million in fiscal 2023, with 1.1 million encounters so far in fiscal 2024, which ends Sept. 30.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, both Republicans, began busing illegal aliens from the border to New York City and other so-called “sanctuary” cities in 2022.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation