New York City Mayor Eric Adams has made an emergency aid request to the state in the light of the illegal immigrant crisis that he said is bringing the city to its “breaking point.”
Since last spring, around 40,000 illegal immigrants have been sheltered in New York city’s five boroughs, according to the mayor. The inflows have been growing at a quickening speed, straining the city’s resources from shelter to food. Over the past week, the city received more than 3,100, including 835 of them on Jan. 12—the largest number of arrivals on a single day in the city’s history.
“We are at our breaking point,” Adams said on Friday, adding that the city, after opening 74 emergency shelters and four humanitarian relief centers, now “faces an immediate need for additional capacity.”
The emergency mutual aid request, coming three months after Adams declared a state of emergency over the illegal immigrant surge, is “reserved only for dire emergencies,” he said. The initial request seeks help to shelter 500 illegal aliens, but Adams noted the number could go up “as New York City continues to see numbers balloon.”
The Republican governor of Texas Greg Abbott, as well as Democrat officials of El Paso, Texas, have been busing illegal immigrants to New York. As the dilemma at the border worsens, Colorado’s Democrat Governor Jared Polis also began to clear illegal aliens from the state by transporting them to places like Chicago and New York, although he stopped doing so following complaints from Democrat mayors of both cities.
Nearly 70,000 people sleep at New York city’s shelter facilities on a given night (pdf). Adams on Friday said he expects the city to have 100,000 people in its care in the combination of illegal aliens and homeless New Yorkers.
About 11,000 illegal migrant children have entered the city’s public schools.
The price tag from the influx could be anywhere from $1.5–$2 billion, the mayor claimed, twice what he previously requested from the Biden administration to address the issue.
“The strain on our infrastructure is just immense. I cannot tell you how much of an impact this is having on our abilities to provide basic services for everyday New Yorkers,” Adams said at a radio appearance on Friday.
“And we have to ask ourselves we’re already dealing with a potential of $5-6 billion budget deficit in the outer years, where does that money come from? That money comes from our schools, it comes from our public safety, our hospitals, our infrastructure, our ACS services,” he said, referring to the city’s childcare assistance programs. “Those are our tax dollars that it’s coming from.”
He called the lack of a “real national response” “inhumane” and “irresponsible.”
The city has received $10 million in federal money, including $8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $2 million from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), but the amount pales in comparison to the $366 million spent on aid to migrants in 2022, according to Budget Director Jacques Jiha.
Adams is traveling to El Paso on Saturday, making multiple stops along the U.S.–Mexican border before heading back on Sunday.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office for comment.
