The mayor of New York City expresses concern as the city grapples with a significant influx of undocumented immigrants seeking refuge.
“Let me tell you something, New Yorkers,” Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday. “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. I don’t see an ending to this.”
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams continued during a town hall meeting on the Upper West Side. The mayor said that New York City is getting about 10,000 migrants a month.
“Now we’re getting people from all over the globe have made their minds up that they’re going to come through the southern part of the border and come into New York City.”
The sanctuary city offers housing, food, and job assistance to undocumented immigrants arriving in New York City. After accommodating thousands of immigrants from Texas, Mayor Adams arranged for their housing at the Roosevelt Hotel.
As the hotel reached full capacity, newly arriving undocumented individuals started sleeping on the sidewalks outside, leading to complaints from local residents. In response, the city established large encampments for single male arrivals.
In a recent development to address this situation, Mayor Adams announced the conversion of an emergency respite site into the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center located at Austell Place in Long Island City.
This decision comes as the number of undocumented individuals under the city’s care approaches 60,000, with more than 110,000 undocumented immigrants having arrived in New York City since the previous spring, as reported by Fox News.
“As asylum seekers have continued to arrive in New York City at an average rate of more than 2,400 every week, conditions on the ground required that the city transition the site to a large-scale congregate setting for single men,” the mayor said in a statement.
The relief center will initially offer shelter to 330 single men, with plans in motion to expand its capacity to accommodate nearly 1,000 asylum seekers.
This newly expanded facility marks the 16th large-scale humanitarian relief center, augmenting the existing network of over 200 shelter sites, as mentioned in the report.
During a separate news conference, Health and Human Services Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom disclosed that as of September 3, the city was providing care for a total of 112,300 individuals, including 59,700 asylum seekers.
She further highlighted that more than 10,100 asylum seekers had been processed through the city’s intake center since September 2022, and in the week ending September 3, over 27,000 new asylum seekers entered the city’s care.
“Hundreds of asylum seekers continue to arrive to our city every day and our heads are barely being kept above water,” Williams-Isom said. “There are solutions to this emergency. We need expedited work authorization, additional financial support, a federal declaration of emergency, a national and a state wide decompression strategy to relieve the pressure that we are feeling here in New York City. ”
“There are solutions here,” she continued. “The status quo is not working, and New Yorkers are demanding that we do more.”
