NEW YORK — The flood of migrants coming into New York City has slowed to a trickle, Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday as he praised President Joe Biden’s “decompression” strategy to lower the number of asylum seekers who’ve strained the city’s social services system.
Adams, who was speaking at an unrelated press conference on the Lower East Side, said the city is now seeing far fewer buses filled with asylum seekers — a stark contrast to the eight to ten busloads the city had been receiving per day prior to the president’s new policy.
“The mayor of El Paso called and said he’s not sending any more buses because of that strategy,” Adams said. “We received, I think, one bus yesterday. Clearly, the decompression strategy is helping New York City, Washington and Chicago. We were receiving the brunt of those buses.”
Adams was responding to a question about whether he supports Biden’s reliance on the Title 42 policy, a controversial tool former President Donald Trump used to keep asylum seekers in Mexico. Biden quietly unveiled his new border policy on Oct. 13 — after months of pressure from both Adams and Republican leaders in border states like Texas and Arizona.
Adams wouldn’t say specifically whether he’s in favor of that particular piece of Biden’s policy, deferring instead to federal officials when it comes to broader national border policies.
“The conversation on how we have a national immigration policy is going to take place with the senators, the Congress and the White House. It’s not going to take place with the mayors. My job is to deal with the influx that we’ve experienced,” he said. “The White House heard us. We needed a decompression strategy. They put it in place.”
Hizzoner did note that he supports Biden’s move to require that asylum seekers secure sponsorship from someone already residing in the U.S. and reiterated his call for the federal government to find a way to make it easier for asylum seekers to work once they arrive.
“I believe figuring out a real national policy on immigration needs to be done. We cannot allow people to come into the country without the proper vetting,” he added. “We need to make sure that we are using the right methods to solve this problem at the source.”
