New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams ripped President Joe Biden’s policies on the southern border Friday, saying that the White House’s position on the issue has turned the Big Apple into a disaster.
Adams has repeatedly asked for assistance from the federal government as New York City deals with thousands of illegal immigrants who have made their way to the city thanks to Biden’s lax border policies. New York City will spend $4.2 billion to house and care for illegal immigrants by the middle of 2024.
“The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” the first-term mayor said during a panel discussion hosted by the African American Mayors Association, the New York Post reported.
The Democrat then said that his city would have seen the biggest financial turnaround in the city’s history if it hadn’t been for the illegal immigration crisis.
“If you removed the $4.2 billion that have been dropped into my city because of a mismanaged asylum seeker issue, you [would have] probably witnessed one of the greatest fiscal turnarounds in the history of New York City,” he said.
Adams’ Friday comments came just two days after he blamed the Biden administration for “turning its back on New York City.”
“Every service in this city is going to be impacted by the asylum seeker crisis,” he added.
The mayor traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with officials at the White House on Friday after putting Biden on blast. Adams met with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, according to Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. He was also scheduled to meet with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell while in the nation’s capital.
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“I don’t have details on what came up in the meetings,” Jean-Pierre said. “I’m sure a range of issues will come up and he’s a partner on many issues.”
There are at least 34,800 illegal immigrants currently being housed in shelters throughout New York City, according to the latest data from City Hall, the Post reported. Last year, Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) began sending buses of illegal immigrants to leftist “sanctuary cities” across the U.S., including New York.
“We’ve got to secure our border because the Biden administration is not securing it,” Abbott said. “And then the reason why we began putting people on buses in the first place is because the Biden administration, they were literally dumping migrants off in small little towns of 10 or 25,000 people, and they were completely overwhelmed.”
Under Biden in fiscal year 2022, the U.S. saw 2,378,944 encounters at the border, excluding the nearly 600,000 known “gotaways” who escaped custody altogether.
