In a sharp escalation of rhetoric over the migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams claimed in stark terms that New York City was being destroyed by an influx of 110,000 migrants from the southern border and said that he did not see a way to fix the issue.
“Let me tell you something New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don’t see an ending to this,” the mayor said on Wednesday night in his opening remarks at a town hall-style gathering in Manhattan. “This issue will destroy New York City.”
Mr. Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, has clashed with leading members of his party as New York City has struggled to provide housing and services to the migrants. For months, Mr. Adams has criticized President Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to help the city handle the asylum seekers and pleaded for additional funding and expedited work permits.
But the mayor’s comments on Wednesday were his most ominous yet. He pointed to new projections that the city’s budget gap could grow to nearly $12 billion — the same amount that city officials estimate that the migrants could cost the city over three years.
“Every community in this city is going to be impacted,” Mr. Adams said at the meeting. “We have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut — every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us.”
The surge of migrants crossing the southern border has overwhelmed the city, with nearly 60,000 occupying beds in traditional city shelters and in more than 200 emergency sites. As New York City students returned to school on Thursday, city officials said that about 20,000 migrant children were expected to join them.
The financial and logistical burden has caused the mayor to repeatedly press Mr. Biden for help this summer, saying last week that the city’s requests were still mostly “unaddressed” and calling for a federal emergency and a national “decompression strategy at the border.”
Mr. Adams repeated the critique on Wednesday.
“We’re getting no support on this national crisis,” he said.
Republican leaders, some of whom have sent buses of migrants to New York, have increasingly used the mayor’s criticism of Mr. Biden as a talking point ahead of the 2024 presidential election. On Tuesday, Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, quoted Mr. Adams in a statement that argued that the “Biden Border Crisis is hurting the country.”
“Mayor Adams is right,” Mr. McCarthy said. “New York City deserves better.”
Mike Pence, the Republican former vice president, said earlier this week that he wanted to give a “hat tip to the mayor of New York, who’s been willing to call out President Joe Biden and his administration for their absolute failure to secure the southern border.”
Fabien Levy, Mr. Adams’s deputy mayor for communications, responded by criticizing “Trump Republicans” for failing to pass immigration reform in Congress.
The mayor’s remarks on Wednesday provided more ammunition to Republicans, including Representative Nick LaLota of New York who applauded Mr. Adams on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, “for being truthful” about the crisis, urging him to “repeal NYC’s sanctuary policies.”
But it also raised the ire of immigrant advocacy groups and some Democrats who have called the mayor’s rhetoric toward migrants racist, and a dramatic departure for a city where Ellis Island served as a gateway to America for decades.
Shahana Hanif, a chair of the New York City Council’s progressive caucus, said that the mayor’s “xenophobic rhetoric is reprehensible and just wrong.” The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said that his comments “villainize people who fled unimaginable situations in their home countries” and that he sounded like “fringe politicians on the far-right of the political spectrum.”
New York City has a mandate that it must provide shelter to anyone who needs it — a policy that has presented an enormous challenge for Mr. Adams, who has tried to weaken the mandate through legal and strategic measures. At the same time, he has sought to appear welcoming to migrants while also raising alarm about the financial impact of hosting them.
Anne Williams-Isom, the city’s deputy mayor for health and human services, said at a news briefing on Wednesday that the right-to-shelter provision was a major reason migrants were choosing to come to the city.
“Before, the right to shelter and what’s going on in New York City was like our little secret,” she said. “Now the whole globe knows that if you go to New York City, we’re going to do what we always do. We have a big heart. We have compassion. We’re going to take care of people.”
But Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said that the mayor’s comments were dangerous and could lead to violence against immigrants.
“What we’ve seen with the rhetoric he’s using is that it’s activating people in a negative way against their new neighbors,” he said. “The mayor should know better. The contributions of the immigrant community here have been seismic.”
In recent weeks, the mayor has tried to heighten awareness of the current and looming impact of the crisis, holding rallies to call for work permits and coordinating social media campaigns.
Some opponents have held protests outside shelters and at the mayor’s Upper East Side residence at Gracie Mansion, leading to the arrest of Curtis Sliwa, the 2021 Republican mayoral candidate.
The setting for the mayor’s comments — the Upper West Side, a wealthy neighborhood in Manhattan whose residents largely did not vote for him in the 2021 mayoral primary election — seemed deliberately chosen.
Mr. Adams said the neighborhood was home to some of the most highly educated people in the city and asked what they had done to help solve the migrant crisis.
“As you ask me a question about migrants, tell me what role you played,” he said. “How many of you organized to stop what they’re doing to us?”
Then he made one last dark warning before opening the floor to questions from the crowd: “The city we knew, we’re about to lose.”
