‘State of emergency’: Adams says NYC migrant influx to cost city $1B
Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency Friday over the ongoing flood of migrants into the Big Apple — warning that they’re pushing the city’s shelter population to an all-time high and will cost taxpayers $1 billion for housing and social services.
“This is unsustainable,” Adams said.
“New York City is doing all we can but we are reaching the outer limit of our ability to help.”
But in a live speech and a Q&A session with reporters at City Hall, Adams continued putting the blame on everyone but himself and Gotham’s well-deserved reputation as a generous “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants.
Instead, he took shots at Republican governors for relocating migrants from the southern border region to Democratic enclaves in the northern US.
“This is a humanitarian crisis that started with violence and instability in South America, and it’s being accelerated by American political dynamics,” he said.
“This crisis is not of our own making but one that will affect everyone in this city now and in the months ahead.”
Hizzoner also again refused to fault President Biden for his controversial border policies but finally called on the mayor of El Paso, fellow Democrat Oscar Leeser, to stop sending busloads of migrants to the Big Apple.
“New York cannot accommodate the number of buses that we have coming here to our city,” Adams said.
“El Paso, the city manager, the mayor, they should stop sending buses to New York.”
Adams emphatically denied Leeser’s assertion — made during a public meeting last month — that he’d agreed during a phone call to “welcome” as many as 200 migrants a day from El Paso.
That conversation took place just days before Adams publicly announced that the city’s shelter system was nearing “its breaking point” due to the crush of migrants.
“There was never an agreement for El Paso to send asylum seekers here,” Adams said.
“We never told them, ‘Please send us your asylum seekers.’ We would never do that. We have our own issue here.”
Adams’ remarks came a day after The Post reported that the 7,330 migrants bused from El Paso since Aug. 23 accounted for more than 42% of the estimated 17,400 who’ve surged into the city since May.
At one point during his Q&A session, the mayor appeared to come closer than ever to blaming Biden for the crisis engulfing the city, as Adams’ critics have done and demanded of him.
“I think the issue is to do a decompression strategy from the national government to make sure that we could, we can ensure that these asylum seekers are spread throughout the entire country,” Adams said.
“We all should be part of resolving this issue.”
But when asked if that meant stemming the flow across the southern border, Adams said, “No.”This is going to take a national coordination, and it should be handled at the border and ensure when people come in, No. 1, they should be allowed to go to the destinations that they desire,” he said.
“And not just incentivized to go to New York, Washington or Chicago, as it currently is being put in place, and then we should ensure that the entire country absorbs this influx of asylum seekers so that we’re not leaning on three cities in the northern part of the country. That is the role of the national government.”
New York has been a “sanctuary city” since 1989, when then-Mayor Ed Koch signed an executive order barring municipal workers from cooperating with federal immigration authorities unless required by law or in connection with criminal investigations.
That directive was later broadened by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make illegal immigrants eligible for benefits including emergency shelter, medical care and food.
Adams declared his support for those policies during last year’s mayoral race, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has cited them, as well as the city’s 1981 “right to shelter” decree, for his decision to send migrants here.
The city has struggled for weeks to find space for the incoming thousands, most of whom are Venezuelans seeking asylum from that country’s brutal dictatorship and economic collapse.
In a tweet Friday, Abbott said, “Sanctuary cities like New York City experience a FRACTION of what Texas border communities face every day.
“We’ll continue busing migrants to NYC, DC, & Chicago to relieve our overwhelmed border towns until Biden does his job to secure the border,” he vowed.
Under his state of emergency, Adams suspended city zoning laws to allow the opening of his planned tent city for migrants on Randall’s Island and any others to follow.
In addition, the order put Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom in charge of the operation and ordered the Office of Emergency Management and the city’s public hospital system to run the facility.
It’s set to temporarily house up to 500 migrants and serve as an intake and processing center before they’re given housing and set up with social services or sent to another destination.
During his speech, Adams offered up a litany of alarming statistics to justify the move:
- More than 61,000 people are now in city shelters, a near-record that he said would be shattered “once the asylum-seekers from today’s buses” enter the system and would likely reach 100,000 next year
- Officials are renting rooms in more than 40 hotels across the city for emergency shelter space
- More than 5,500 migrant kids have been enrolled in city public schools
The mayor — who’s asked the White House for $500 million in emergency aid — called on Congress to shorten the mandatory six-month waiting period for migrants to obtain work permits after filing for asylum.
He said the bureaucratic delay forced migrants who want to work to instead rely on “long-term shelter, healthcare and a great deal of institutional support.”
“It is straining the limits of our ability to care for New Yorkers in need and it is burning through our city’s budget,” he said.
He also called on Gov. Kathy Hochul to provide financial aid, staffing support and to free up state-controlled sites to provide housing.
“We need help from the federal government, we need help from the state of New York,” he said.
In addition, Adams said that “we need a bipartisan effort to deliver long-awaited immigration reform” — a request that is unlikely to be granted following the failure of similar efforts in recent years.