Mayor Muriel Bowser has declared that the city’s shelters for newly arrived migrant families are full to the brim. But her administration also just blocked a bill aimed at helping migrants move out of those facilities and put down roots in the community. What, exactly, is anyone bused to D.C. supposed to do?

It’s a double bind for migrants that has organizers (and some councilmembers) pulling their hair out. And the fact that Bowser once again relied on some budgetary tricks to blunt this effort, rather than engaging with the issue, has only deepened the frustration in the Wilson Building.

The last time around, Bowser’s deputies claimed they simply couldn’t find the funds to implement a cap on rent increases at rent-controlled apartments, taking advantage of an obscure provision in D.C. law that stipulates any legislation moved on an emergency basis can’t cost the government any money. That forced the Council to delay its work and set up an unseemly scramble to impose the cap after landlords already started raising rents. The mayor’s Department of Human Services doubled down on that same approach earlier this month, with similarly damaging consequences.

“When it suits the executive, they’re able to absorb those costs without any problem, even though we know there’s a cost,” says Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, whose legislation was the latest victim of Bowser’s budget games. “And when it doesn’t suit the executive, they choose not to.”

Specifically, Allen’s bill would let migrants apply for temporary ID cards, known as “limited purpose credentials,” to give them some form of identification establishing their residence in this country. Most people arriving in the District have had their passports and other identifying documents seized while crossing the southern border, leaving them unable to do basic things like open bank accounts, sign apartment leases, or apply for asylum.

These ID cards, originally created by the Council a decade ago to help undocumented immigrants, would help migrants establish just the smallest toehold here and manage the maddeningly complex immigration process. But the law’s current requirements, such as the rule that an applicant must live in D.C. for at least six months, mean these LPCs are still out of reach for most migrants. The regulations prompted advocates working with new arrivals to push for a bill to loosen the application process for those who have been “transported to the District by the executive branch of another state,” according to the bill.

Allen was ready to move the legislation at the Council’s July 11 meeting, aiming to ensure migrants could start applying for temporary IDs without waiting for lawmakers’ two-month-long summer recess to wrap up. But Bowser’s DHS claimed it would need to spend about $139,000 to hire another employee to implement the bill’s requirements, per emails forwarded to Loose Lips, forcing Allen to withdraw his bill.

“Essentially, they budget-vetoed the bill,” laments Madhvi Venkatraman, an organizer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, which has been working with new arrivals to the city ever since buses from Texas and Arizona started reaching the District in April 2022. “All they did was just kill the opportunity for all these folks to get identification so that they can actually put down roots in the area, which hurts them in the long run.”

Perhaps most frustratingly, Allen says the main agency that would be implementing his bill’s provisions, the Department of Motor Vehicles, didn’t see any new costs associated with it (and his staff provided emails to LL confirming that assertion). The DMV, of course, has to actually issue these IDs, and assured Allen that its existing staff could manage the task.

DHS, which houses the city’s Office of Migrant Services, has a much more perfunctory, bureaucratic role to play. All the agency would need to do, Allen says, is confirm that they’ve interacted with a migrant before the DMV issues them a temporary ID. He says it amounts to “essentially sending a letter,” and yet the agency felt this would be such an arduous process that it needed to hire more staff. As a DHS executive put it in an email to Council staffers on July 10, this “program analyst” would “coordinate, develop policy and procedures for the implementation of the bill.”

“The frustration is that those new residents of the District of Columbia are left waiting for several more months without a resolution,” Allen says. “One agency was a really strong partner. The DMV was a really good partner and trying to help think through a solution. But their sister agency really was more throwing up roadblocks, and that’s really disappointing.”

Spokespeople for both the DMV and DHS didn’t respond to requests for comment. But organizers such as Venkatraman can’t help but suspect that the mayor’s growing dismissiveness toward these migrants helped spur this decision. Bowser has repeatedly tried to avoid responsibility for caring for people bused to the city, and generally described the situation as an undue strain on the city’s resources that the federal government is obligated to assume. Her rhetoric has only grown tougher in the months since buses started arriving in the city.

“We are not a system that can support the southern border and immigration policies, or lack thereof, of the United States of America,” Bowser said in an appearance on WAMU 88.5’s The Politics Hour back in May. “Our system is set up to deal with D.C. residents who are having emergencies.”

In the year since Bowser created the Office of Migrant Services, D.C. has spent more than $20 million responding to the buses carrying migrants from Texas and Arizona, NBC4 reported last month. And the office has only one full-time employee.

Venkatraman says her own conversations with city officials suggest that they see these IDs as a “pull factor” that will convince more migrants to come to D.C. But she believes this is a misplaced fear. She says the District’s move to cut off access to shelter for arriving migrants is a bigger deterrent than a small ID program would be a draw. Even with these limited purpose credentials, migrants would not be able to apply for most public assistance programs, such as food stamps, Venkatraman notes.

In fact, she observed that several councilmembers voted against the original legislation that would have created these LPCs because the program didn’t go far enough in treating immigrants equitably. Among the opponents was then-Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells, now Bowser’s top legislative staffer.

“It’s ironic that Tommy Wells is now in charge of the legal affairs team that helped kill the bill when his original concern is it wasn’t progressive enough,” Venkatraman says.

Venkatraman estimates 340 families are still living in the city’s hotel shelters. Roughly two dozen more are living in cars, couch surfing, or simply living on the street, she says, and all of them would immediately benefit from access to these IDs. Just about every part of American government bureaucracy requires some form of state-backed identification, and yet new arrivals often can’t prove their own identities.

“Ultimately, immigrants are trapped in a Kafkaesque system that tells them they are not who they say they are,” says Michaela Lovejoy, a supervising immigration attorney at the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project who has worked with many new arrivals. “They may be stripped of their identity documents when they enter the country, or they may suffer the misfortune of losing their wallets. Once you’re stuck in the loop, there is no off-road out of the Catch-22.”

While these new migrants are often caricatured as “line jumpers” or “rule breakers” trying to game the immigration system, advocates stress that most are simply trying to follow the rules as best they can while dealing with their absurdities. Many people are fleeing political persecution in countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru and are working to apply for asylum in the U.S., but have run into trouble with a lack of identifying documents at pretty much every step.

Even something as basic as getting a marriage license is virtually impossible, Venkatraman says, and that can make joint applications for asylum much more complicated. Similarly, it’s difficult for mothers of new babies to get birth certificates (Venkatraman estimates there have been 11 children born to recent migrants in D.C.).

“I think it’s incumbent on us to live the values we espouse and do everything we possibly can to help these individuals,” Allen says.

Allen is working with DHS to find some sort of solution to let his bill move forward, and he’s hopeful “those costs can be absorbed and we can move it in September.” But if the agency remains obstinate, migrants will have to wait and see if the Council can pass a permanent version of the bill—a much lengthier process requiring a hearing, a committee markup, and two Council votes.

LL can’t help but note that this dynamic will keep playing out in the Wilson Building unless the Council does the difficult, decidedly unsexy work of changing its rules around emergency legislation. Just as congressional Democrats regularly find themselves stymied by the filibuster despite winning majorities in both chambers, D.C. voters have elected a left-leaning Council that routinely sees its priorities dashed by obscure veto points within the system. Even something as universally supported as an independent investigation into ex-Bowser aide John Falcicchio’s sexual harassment scandal was nearly stymied by cost concerns until lawmakers found a budget workaround.

Meanwhile, there’s always money to be found for more conservative policy goals, like keeping more people locked up before trial.

“For this to not have a fiscal impact makes no logical sense,” Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George said during the July 11 debate over Bowser’s crime bill. “If housing, access to jobs, and Vision Zero is less important that [Bowser] can’t absorb the cost… the record will reflect that.”

But LL wonders: Is that record clearly understood by anyone but the most loyal City Paper readers? And how long will ordinary voters keep supporting progressive lawmakers if their most ambitious ideas never translate into real changes?