NEW YORK — After months of pleading with the federal government to direct more relief toward the city’s migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams laid into President Joe Biden on Wednesday, saying that Biden and the White House have “failed New York City.”
“The national government has turned its back on New York City,” Adams said during a news conference at City Hall. “This is in the lap of the president of the United States. The president of the United States can give us the ability to allow people to work.”
The remarks were Adams’ most forceful to date on Biden’s role in aiding the city, as its agencies have struggled to shoulder the burden of hundreds of migrants arriving here each day.
Since last spring, more than 55,000 migrants have come to the Big Apple, many of them seeking asylum from countries in Latin America and Africa. According to data released by the city Wednesday, more than 34,000 of them are currently receiving some sort of assistance from the city government.
Adams has called on the feds to speed up the process by which migrants receive work permits and has said for months that such a policy shift represents a key piece of relieving the pressure the city has felt since last April.
On Wednesday, the mayor made his demands more specific and explicit when he called on Biden to increase the number of staffers within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and reassign USCIS officers to reduce wait times for work permits to be authorized.
The ability to work, Adams said, is the foremost concern among newly arrived migrants he has spoken with.
“There’s only one thing they ask for. They don’t want our free shelter. They don’t want free food. They don’t want free clothing. They’re saying: ‘Can we work?’” Adams, a Democrat, said. “And we can’t point to the failure of the Republicans handing down real immigration reform because there’s real things we can do. This is in the lap of the president.”
Without accelerating the work permit process, Adams said that other efforts such as relocating migrants to other parts of the state can’t move forward.
Adams’ call on the president to increase staffing at a key federal agency comes at a time when he and his administration have struggled to fill key roles in city agencies dedicated to providing essential services like food stamps and housing vouchers to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.
But Adams focused on the feds Wednesday, and to a lesser extent the City Council and press corps, in explaining why the city now finds itself in its current predicament.
The mayor reserved some praise for Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, though.
Williams was in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with members of the city’s congressional delegation pushing for more relief from the federal government.
“This issue did not originate when the first bus arrived at Port Authority. It is rooted in decades of inaction toward reforming our immigration infrastructure and agencies’ inability to adapt to the needs of people arriving in our country,” they said in a joint statement. “We must implement real, achievable, sustainable changes to our federal systems of immigration to help ensure that people coming to our country for its opportunities do not find themselves arriving in a new crisis of our own inertia.”
Adams and his budget director, Jacques Jiha, estimate the total bill for taking care of the migrants will ultimately exceed $4 billion and that such an outlay will translate into being forced to cut key city services, something Adams wants to avoid.
Adams has been calling on the feds to speed up that process for months, but Wednesday’s remarks represent the first time he’s offered a specific suggestion on how to go about implementing it.
Since last spring, approximately 50,000 migrants —many of them from Latin America seeking asylum — have come to the city, putting an inordinate strain on the city’s social services agencies.
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