New York City Mayor Eric Adams' migrant crisis approach shifts to 'no more room at the inn'

It was Summer 2022, and unwanted border crossers had started to be bused by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to sanctuary cities like New York in protest of Biden administration border policies. A 2,000-mile drive away at Manhattan's main bus terminal, Mayor Eric Adams held a photo op to personally welcome the new arrivals.

Here in New York, migrants would be provided Big Apple hospitality — indefinite room and board, easy access to municipal ID cards, help navigating the federal immigration bureaucracy, a pathway to a new life.

“As the mayor of the City of New York, I don’t weigh into immigration issues, border issues. I have to provide services for families that are here, and that’s what we’re gonna do, our responsibility as a city. I’m proud that this is a right-to-shelter state, and we’re gonna continue to do that,” Adams said. 

What a difference almost two years — and a steady increase surpassing 175,000 migrants and counting — have made.

“There’s no more room at the inn,” Adams said as the headcount had reached more than 30,000, less than five months after the photo op.

And as migrants continued to come to the city last year, so did efforts by the mayor's administration to make their stay less hospitable.

In May 2023, with more than 65,000 migrants, the city shut down the volunteer-led welcome center at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where Adams had done the photo op. The same month, Adams' lawyers sought court permission to limit the right to shelter.

In July, the head count surpassed 90,000, and the administration started distributing yellow fliers at the U.S.-Mexico border and via social media discouraging the migrants from coming. 

In September, the number reached more than 100,000, and Adams warned that the migrant crisis “will destroy New York City” and soon ordered cuts to the municipal budget of city services to offset migrant costs.

His chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, told WPIX/11 in the fall, with more than 118,000 migrants, that the federal government should “close the borders,” a demand met with outrage from the political left (and later disavowed by Adams).

Adams has pleaded, with limited success, for more money from the Biden administration. As more funds haven't materialized, Adams has intensified his criticism of President Joe Biden and the White House, fraying the fellow Democrats’ once-strong relationship. According to published reports from late 2023, the two had not spoken in roughly a year.

“Our compassion may be limitless,” Adams likes to say about the migrant crisis, “but our resources are not.”

Allocation questions

By the upcoming fiscal year, Adams expects, the city will have spent about $10.6 billion on the crisis.

White House spokesperson Andres Correa declined to address Adams' criticism that the feds have provided the city too little money.

According to federal databases, at least $146 million has been allocated to New York, more than 99% to the city, to handle the crisis. But it's unclear how much the city has actually gotten.

Adams spokesperson Kayla Mamelak said Sunday that the city has “received” just $49 million. Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a key agency in handing out the money, said the feds have “delivered” more than $140 million to the city and state. Neither spokesperson explained the discrepancy, but Politico reported last month that the city had initially failed to collect each migrant's “alien identification number” and provide the information to the feds as is necessary for full reimbursement.   

Late last summer, WNBC reported the Biden administration had suggested getting rid of the city’s right to shelter — unique in the nation, dating back to 1981. The Biden team believes the city’s right to shelter provides a never-ending incentive for border crossers to come into the United States.

Asked about the mayor’s changing approach, Mamelak said: “New York City has led the nation in managing this national humanitarian crisis — providing compassion and care to more than 175,000 migrants since the spring of 2022.” But, she added, the city's resources are finite.

“We need a national solution to this national crisis,” she said.

Marked for eviction

Migrants are now evicted from city homeless shelters, tents and city-subsidized hotels — after 30 days for individuals, after 60 days for families — and those still needing a place to stay must begin the bureaucratic process anew, a red-tape-strewn ordeal of waiting and sometimes crisscrossing the city in search of an available bed.

The administration chafes at the term eviction, describing the new policy — which resulted, starting around August, in a relative stabilization of the migrant head count in city-provided housing, now at about 66,000 — as including “intensive and sustained case management ... helping them on their journey to independence.”

Still, there have been more migrants in shelters than from the traditional homeless population of longtime New Yorkers. 

It’s not just housing where the city’s policies have become less hospitable to the migrants.

Appointments for municipal ID cards, which help migrants establish a new life in the city, are harder to come by. Bus drop-offs are limited, by mayoral order, to certain weekday morning hours, with a mandate that charter bus operators provide at least 32 hours’ notice. Shuttle buses that had been running between the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where the welcome center had been shut down in May, and a new intake center, were cut in July: Migrants must now find their way several city blocks northeast, to the Roosevelt Hotel, the site of the intake center, to be processed. It was at the Roosevelt where, in July, migrants slept for days behind sidewalk barricades on cardboard because, the Adams administration said, the city had run out of space for them.

“It's not going to get any better. From this moment on, it's downhill. There is no more room,” Adams said then, with over 93,000 to date. Advocates for migrants said there actually was room in the shelter system but Adams instead used migrants as “props” to make a point, a claim the administration has denied.

Record-setting border crossings

A year earlier, when the head count had been about 2,800 migrants, the mayor was more welcoming.

“New York has been and will always be a city of immigrants that welcomes newcomers with open arms,” he said in a statement issued by City Hall. “This value has made our city a beacon of freedom for people around the world and the economic and cultural powerhouse that it is. These very same humanitarian values apply to those who are experiencing homelessness. In New York City, we have both a moral — and legal — obligation to house anyone who is experiencing homelessness for any reason.”

The 2023 fiscal year set a record: More than 2.4 million migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, topping the previous record, set the year before.

Tens of thousands of the migrants — though not most who have ended up in the city — have been bused by the Texas program, called Operation Lone Star. Buses have also dropped migrants in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

The Texas busing operation — which, like others by certain Red State politicians in the southwest United States, offers free passage and is voluntary — is meant to shine a spotlight on what Abbott sees as the Biden administration’s yearslong refusal to enforce immigration law, a dose of reality for what Abbott considers to be Blue State hypocrisy. He wants “to provide relief to overwhelmed border towns” and Adams to “walk the walk.”

Adams, who has called the busing policies “inhumane” and “un-American” and Abbott a “madman,” says that Texas and other states are cruelly treating migrants as political pawns, shuttling them onto buses for long, cross-country journeys, including families and babies with serious medical needs, giving zero notice to receiving jurisdictions that are doing their best to provide a measure of decency and compassion to those seeking the American dream.

Abbott’s office didn’t respond to an email Monday seeking comment.

Migrants are also coming on their own, some by plane. Others had already been living in other parts of the country before relocating to New York City.

“They're hearing about New York City and what they get when they come to New York City,” Anne Williams-Isom, the Adams deputy overseeing the crisis response, said in July.

“Before, it was kind of, the right to shelter, and what's going on in New York City, was, like, our little secret. Now the whole globe knows that if you go to New York City, we're gonna do what we always do, right? We have a big heart,” she said in September. “We have compassion. We're gonna take care of people. You're gonna get a hotel room. You're gonna get school, open arms, and while we love that and we are so proud of that, I think in a way it's being used against us. And I am frustrated by that.”

Tents for families

The city has opened more than 200 sites to house migrants, including office buildings, hotels, houses of worship and tents pitched at places such as Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, Randall's Island in the East River and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center parking lot near the Queens-Nassau border.

Tents were initially just for single adults, with families being housed in hotels. No longer. There are now tents for families, too.

Sanctuary cities such as New York do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, except under rare circumstances, and typically provide certain social services regardless of whether a person is living illegally in the United States. 

Last week, the NYPD broke up a theft ring involving a dozen migrants who allegedly committed 62 robberies in the city by riding mopeds and scooters and snatching victims’ property, such as iPhones and wallets. 

Adams, a former police captain, tagged along on the raid.

Republicans like City Councilman Joe Borelli of Staten Island, the chamber’s minority leader, have reacted to the migrant crisis — and the Adams administration’s gradually harder line — with told-ya-so tut-tutting.

“It’s a welcome change in direction, but you also can’t go back and Photoshop the pictures of the big smiles and handshakes as you welcome people off the bus,” Borelli said. He added: “The most predictable outcome, which Republicans shouted from the mountaintops, came true.”

Still, it was Adams himself, back in July 2022, who foreshadowed what was to come absent money “immediately” from the federal government: a potential “struggle to provide the proper level of support our clients deserve.”

But back then, he was more hopeful.

“We’ve been in discussions with our federal partners on this matter,” he said, “and look forward to a quick resolution.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

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