New York Mayor Eric Adams: Over the weekend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams went to the Texas border city of El Paso to ask the federal government for more money and help for American cities that are taking in tens of thousands of people fleeing economic and political crises and unrest in Latin America.
During his first trip as mayor to the U.S.-Mexico border, Adams said that cities like New York and El Paso were on the “front lines” of an unprecedented migrant crisis. This crisis led the Biden administration to adopt a new plan to discourage people from crossing the border illegally.
Adams, a Democrat who declared an emergency in October because so many migrants were coming to New York, said that most of the operational and financial work of taking care of migrants released from federal custody at the border is being done by cities across the U.S.
“Our cities are being hurt by what is happening in Chicago, New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington. And we didn’t do anything wrong, “Adams said at a press conference on Sunday. “This is not fair to the immigrants. The people who live in these cities don’t deserve this.”
“We want our national leaders to do more to deal with this problem realistically,” Adams said. The mayor of New York City asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to “step up” and start a nationwide operation to help cities and other local communities that are taking in migrants who are being processed at the U.S. border.
Adams emphasized that New York City “cannot take any more migrants” because there are no more places to stay there. No, we can’t. In the past few months, El Paso has had a hard time dealing with a sharp rise in the number of migrants coming to the city, most of whom come from countries in a crisis like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
In Texas, a city run by Democrats has turned a convention center and two empty middle schools into temporary housing for migrants to help relieve pressure on overcrowded city shelters. Even so, many migrants still sleep on El Paso’s streets.
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In the past few months, tens of thousands of people who came into the U.S. through the southern border also went to New York City. Some of them got to the city with the help of American volunteers or family. Others have been taken by bus to New York by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.
Abbott is taking migrants to cities run by Democrats to protest President Biden’s border policies. Last year, city officials in El Paso also sent dozens of buses full of migrants to New York. But its operation wasn’t meant to send a political message. Instead, it was intended to make local shelters less crowded.
Since last year, Adams has been warning that if the state and federal government don’t do more to help New York welcome migrants, the state’s finances and operations will be in bad shape. To help the newcomers, the city has set up 74 shelters and four processing centers, some of which are in old hotels.
New York has helped about 40,000 migrants by giving them a place to stay, food, and other services. City officials estimate that this will cost more than $1 billion. Last week, Adams told New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, that the situation was “pushing New York City to the edge” and asked state officials to help shelter 500 migrants.
Adams said, “We are at the end of our rope.” “Based on what we think will happen, we won’t be able to keep taking in new asylum seekers on our own. We have asked the State of New York for emergency mutual aid starting this weekend.”
During his trip to El Paso on Saturday and Sunday, Adams met with local volunteers, shelter workers, migrants, and city leaders, like Mayor Oscar Leeser, another Democrat who asked the Biden administration for help to house, feed, and move migrants and got it.
Sunday, Adams told a group of migrants that he would fight for them to be able to work in the U.S. and live the “American dream.” The group cheered and applauded when he said this. Adams has said that one thing that bothers him most is that migrants who come to New York City can’t legally work because of a federal law that says they can’t get work permits until their asylum requests have been pending for several months.
Even though he has asked the federal government to remove this rule, it can only be changed by Congress, which has not passed a primary immigration law since the 1990s. Adams said on Sunday that only Congress could develop a long-term plan for handling migration along the southern border.
“The Senate, Congress, and the White House are going to pass real immigration reform,” he said. Other Democrats have joined Adams in asking the federal government to do more to help cities house migrants who have been let into the country by border guards. At the same time, their asylum cases are being decided.
On the ground in El Paso last night. This is a national crisis and we need a national solution. Mayors like @OscarLeeser and I are on the front lines and we need federal support. pic.twitter.com/MkD8xZelNf
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) January 15, 2023
On Sunday, the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, said she agreed “100%” with Adams’ call for more federal help. She was grateful for what the Biden administration was doing to help with the humanitarian crisis along the southern border.
Still, she said more needed to be done to help with the “urgent needs” of migrants arriving in Chicago, where Texas state officials have also been busing migrants. “Months and thousands of migrants later, we’re still struggling to figure out how to handle the rise in asylum-seekers and the rising costs that come with them,” Lightfoot wrote on Twitter. “This is mostly the job of cities.”
Early this month, the Biden administration released its most comprehensive plan to deal with the vast number of migrants coming across the southern border. It said it would send more migrants back to their home countries who entered the U.S. illegally.
It also said it would make it easier for some migrants to enter the country legally, including through a program for those with financial sponsors in the U.S. Officials in the Biden administration have said that the federal government has helped local communities take in migrants by giving money grants through a FEMA program.
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