Cannot send message to specific group in Django Channels

I have a websocket that receives a token as a query string. My custom middleware then decodes this token to find the username passed through this token.

The current user connecting to the websocket is then subscribed to a group named after their user_id. Let's assume UserA goes through this process initially and they are subscribed to group '1'

UserB then connects to the websocket following the same process. At this point I assume there are two groups; one named '1' and another names '2'.

Upon UserA triggering the send & receive method in the frontend, I have a consumer function that sends a message to the group with the user_id it receives ('2').

However, when this code runs, I don't seem to be sending a message to any group. I am not getting any error message (I can see the message I want to send being printed on my terminal).

However when I open two browsers; one with UserA and the other with UserB, when I connect to the websocket and trigger send/receive I don't see the message I am sending being console logged on either browsers.

Here is the code for the consumer class handling the connect, send and receive methods:

class PracticeConsumer(AsyncConsumer):
    async def websocket_connect(self, event):
        username = self.scope['user']
        username_id = str(await self.get_user(username))
        await self.channel_layer.group_add('{}'.format(username_id), self.channel_name)
        await self.send({"type": "websocket.accept", })
        
    async def websocket_receive(self, event):
        received = event["text"]
        user_and_id = received.split()
        username = user_and_id[0]
        user_id = str(await self.get_user(username))
        sleep(1)
        await self.channel_layer.group_send(
            '{}'.format(user_id),
            {
                "type": "send.message",
                "message": "!!!!the websocket is sending this back!!!!",
            },
        )

    async def websocket_disconnect(self, event):
        print("disconnected", event)

    async def send_message(self, event):
        message = event['message']
        self.send({
            'message': message
        })

    @database_sync_to_async
    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(username=user_id).pk
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return AnonymousUser()