In his most urgent plea to the Biden administration to date, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on Friday that immigration had “destroyed” the city.
New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, will go to the nation’s capital on Friday to lobby for federal aid and warn of multibillion-dollar damage to the city’s coffers if the Trump administration continues to ignore New York.
Before meeting with the mayor, Adams became visibly agitated when speaking on a panel for the African American Mayors Association, where he said, “The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”
His next scathing assault on his fellow New York City officials was this: “And none of my folks came to Washington DC to fight for the resources that is going to undermine every agency in our city.”
Adams said that on Wednesday, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, traveled to Washington, DC to ask for additional support for migrants.
The mayor reportedly discussed the immigration problem with White House staff and FEMA head Deanne Criswell before releasing his fiery remarks.
Adams was absent for Vice President Biden’s meeting with mayors in the Roosevelt Room on Friday afternoon.
Adams has been outspoken in his criticism of the Biden administration’s reluctance to offer further financial aid to New York City, which is facing a $4.3 billion quandary as a result of the city’s decision to accept more than 56,000 migrants in more than 100 shelters supported by taxpayers.
Adams stated on Wednesday that the decision by the White House to cut off supplies to the city has resulted in “one of the largest humanitarian crises that this city has ever experienced.”
“The federal government has abandoned New York City,” Adams said. The effects of the surge of asylum seekers on the city as a whole will be significant.
It won’t be known until May 31 if the city received the $654 million in FEMA aid requested to close the budget shortfall sought by the local administration. The city spent $817 million from July 2022 to March 2023, according to the Office of Budget and Management.
The mayor has mandated that $4 billion in savings be made over the next four years so that the city can pay the massive humanitarian initiative.
Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul proposes a budget that splits the cost of New York City’s migrant crisis equally between the state, the city, and the federal government. But Adams has already forewarned that New York City will bear the worst of it.
Adams did not identify names during his DC panel appearance; but, critics have noted that prominent Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries have been notably mute on the topic of migrant fundraising as of late.
New York City may apply for a portion of the $1.7 billion that Schumer added to Biden’s budget blueprint in December to aid migrants.
Political analyst Hank Sheinkopf told The Post that they likely don’t want to get involved in Adams’ spat with Biden.
Sheinkopf puts it best when he says that Adams is “trying to throw the weight off him onto the President, whom he’s criticized before,” thus neither the mayors of significant cities nor the federal authorities are likely to want to join him.
One “cannot criticize an incumbent president, as Adams has done this week,” he continued. When someone attacks the president of their own party, he says, “they’re thinking: You never come back from attacking the president of your own party.”
Adams and three other Democratic mayors of big cities said during a panel discussion on Friday in Washington, DC, that if it weren’t for the extra billions had to be paid out for the migrant crisis, he would have been recognized with New York City’s largest-ever financial turnaround.
He stated that New York City would have seen “one of the greatest fiscal turnarounds in its history” if the federal government had withheld the $4.2 billion in help handed to the city as a result of a badly handled asylum seeker problem.
According to the most up-to-date figures from City Hall, a total of 34,800 asylum seekers are now being housed in 104 emergency shelters and 8 Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs). Almost 56 thousand tourists visited New York City last year.