Mayor Eric Adams slashes migrant spending, cancels NYC budget cuts

Mayor Eric Adams is further slashing New York City's spending on foreign migrants' room and board, his office said Wednesday.

Costs are to be cut by 10%, or about $586 million — on top of the 20% cuts announced last month, or about $1.7 billion — according to Adams spokesman Charles Lutvak.

Specific cuts weren't disclosed.

As a result of the latest cuts, Adams is also canceling another round of planned reductions to the municipal budget. Undoing those cuts is possible because of less spending on the migrants and a better-than-expected economy. Those potential cuts to the municipal budget could have totaled up to $4.1 billion.

Since April 2022, more than 178,600 migrants — mostly from Latin America — have come to the city, straining the homeless shelter system.

The city is now expected to spend around $10 billion though the next fiscal year on housing, feeding and otherwise caring for the migrants, Lutvak said. The projection was $10.6 billion before the planned migrant cuts announced Wednesday, and $12 billion before the cuts announced in January. 

For decades, the city has been under a unique-in-the-nation mandate to provide room and board to anyone in need, a policy applied, for at least a year after the influx began, to foreign migrants, too.

But starting last year, the Adams administration began evicting migrants from shelters, after 30 days for single migrants or 60 days for those with a child. A migrant who still needs housing can reapply but the city has added bureaucratic red tape that makes it harder to get a bed.

The eviction policy, which the administration calls “intensive case work to build self-sufficient lives,” has helped stabilize the migrant population housed in city-provided shelters or hotels, now at about 65,000 after growing steadily for over a year until the policy.

Last month, Adams restored the first round of cuts he had threatened, citing the same type of economic and migrant-cost savings.

At the start of the crisis, in 2022, the mayor personally welcomed migrants coming off buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is protesting the Biden administration's border policies by busing unwanted border crossers.

But since then, Adams has made the city's welcome less hospitable, declaring, “there’s no more room at the inn.”

Even small costs aren't exempt from scrutiny. 

“Taking away certain items like cheese on hamburgers is a difference,” said Adams, who has said he generally avoids eating animal products. “I hope it was vegan cheese on the hamburger.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.