On Friday, October 7, New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency to help respond to the migration crisis, which he said will cost the city $1 billion this fiscal year.
“We now have a situation where more people are arriving in New York City than we can immediately accommodate, including families with babies and young children,” Adams said. “As the asylum seekers from today’s buses are housed, we will surpass the largest number of people in history recorded in our city’s shelter system.”
The mayor is calling for federal and state assistance to deal with the situation.
The crisis is a consequence of a political tactic by the governors of Texas and Arizona, who decided to send immigrants who recently crossed their borders to northeastern cities like Washington D.C. and New York City, traditionally Democratic strongholds that support more lenient immigration policies.
Hundreds of buses, funded by the state governments of Texas and Arizona, have been arriving in northeastern cities bringing undocumented immigrants without money and without families to receive them, who end up in homeless shelters or on park benches or subway stations.
The emergency measures, according to the New York City mayor, aim to allow the city to quickly build additional shelter capacity. Adams said that since May, the city has received 4,000 asylum seekers and increased its homeless population by 10%.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, both Republicans, blame President Biden for the record number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. For the first time, the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants along the border has surpassed two million in a year, continuing a historic pace of undocumented immigrants arriving in the country.
As Congress and the federal government, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to ignore the existing migration crisis in the country, immigrants will continue to be used as a “political tool.”