New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Friday declared a state of emergency over the arrival of thousands of migrants from the southern US border by bus in recent months, calling for help from the Biden administration, as the city’s overwhelmed shelters struggle to accommodate the recent arrivals.
Adams, a Democrat, said the city’s shelters are running out of bed space, with more than 61,000 homeless New Yorkers and migrants, including 20,000 children, in its housing system. A fifth of refugees are migrants, he said. The city has also enrolled 5,500 newly arrived migrant children in public schools.
At the current rate, the local shelter system could house 100,000 people next year, Adams said. He added that the city also plans to spend more than $1 billion to welcome and house migrants next July.
So far, New York City has turned more than 40 hotels into makeshift shelters and plans to establish a tent city on Randall’s Island, but Adams said the city won’t have the money or capacity to housing to support thousands of additional migrants and at the same time help the domestic homeless population.
“We now have a situation where more people are coming into New York City than we can immediately accommodate, including families with babies and young children,” Adams said. “Once the asylum seekers on the current buses are sheltered, we will pass the highest number of people in our city’s reception system in history.”
Since the spring, more than 17,000 migrants, many of them asylum seekers from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries, have arrived in New York City on hundreds of buses from the border between USA and Mexico, according to city data. .
Thousands of migrants are in New York as Texas state officials put them on buses to New York City, Washington, DC and Chicago to protest the Biden administration’s handling of record border detentions reported during the last year
Democratic officials in El Paso have also offered free bus rides to New York City to migrants as part of an effort to ease overcrowding at local shelters, largely due to a sharp increase in the number of Venezuelan asylum seekers entering West Texas.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Adams said Friday that Republican state officials who have been sending migrants to New York were exploiting the values of welcome, social services and right-to-housing laws for “political gain.”
“We didn’t ask for this,” he said. “There was never any agreement to take on the job of supporting thousands of asylum seekers. That responsibility was simply handed to us without warning when the buses started turning up.”
Renae Eze, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called Adams’ comments hypocritical and countered that the mayor should tell President Biden to implement tougher policies on the U.S. border and Mexico.
“The real emergency is on our nation’s southern border, where small Texas border towns are being invaded and overwhelmed by hundreds of migrants every day as the Biden administration pours them into their communities,” Eze said.
State data shows Texas has transported more than 12,000 migrants to Democratic-controlled cities on 270 buses, including roughly 3,100 in New York City.
In remarks Friday, Adams urged federal and state officials to help New York City welcome migrants by increasing funding, resources and new legal authorities; has described the current situation as “unsustainable”.
Adams also called on New York State to support the establishment of migrant assistance centers. He implored Congress to pass laws that would streamline the process to allow asylum seekers to work in the U.S., which would allow them to find jobs in the city, and he wants lawmakers to overhaul the immigration system, including legalizing undocumented immigrants already living. in the USA
The federal government, Adams suggested, should also implement a “decompression strategy” along the US-Mexico border to “slow the outflow of asylum seekers” and transport migrants to other cities “to ensure – make sure everyone does their part.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to requests for comment on Adams’ lawsuits.
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