Mayor Eric Adams and several other Democratic mayors from big cities across the country are demanding that President Biden meet with them and provide additional aid to cope with the growing migrant crisis.
Hizzoner — alongside Los Angeles’ Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Houston’s Sylvester Turner and Denver’s Mike Johnston — specifically, and in bold type, requested “an urgent meeting” with Biden to “directly discuss ways we can work with your administration to avoid large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities with little to no coordination, support or resources.”
The letter requests that the president provide additional federal funding to help offset the cost of providing housing and social services to the new arrivals, speed approvals for their work papers, increase the number of migrants eligible to work and calls for a “coordinated entry and distribution process of newcomers once they arrive.”
“We believe we have a unique opportunity to work with the White House and Congress over these next few weeks to create an immigration and asylum system that will treat our newcomers with dignity and be fair and equitable to cities and neighborhoods across the country,” the mayors concluded.
“Given the urgency of this issue, we are all willing to travel to DC next week to sit down and discuss our shared interest in finding a successful resolution.”
Late Wednesday, Adams said he was heading to Washington with the other mayors to meet with federal lawmakers and the White House, though a City Hall spokesman declined to say who he would be meeting with from the Biden administration.
The two-page missive from the mayors, dated Oct. 28, is new evidence of mounting frustrations between some of the nation’s largest — and most Democratic — cities and Biden over his slow-footed response to the waves of migrants arriving from Central and South America.
Many of the migrants plan to seek asylum and were driven northward to flee violence — including death squads sanctioned by their home countries — and dire economic circumstances.
More than 133,000 people have arrived in New York City alone since the onset of the crisis last spring, according to tallies City Hall provided reporters last week.
Adams recently flew to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia to tour the conditions in those countries and mount an effort in the local Spanish-speaking media to discourage people from attempting to come north.
However, the trip was heavily criticized back in New York after reporters who traveled with the mayor revealed that few potential migrants had gotten the message — and that Adams failed to deliver it himself during conversations with residents at a shelter for the needy in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito.
City Hall has said that it expects the crisis will cost the Big Apple an estimated $12 billion between 2023 and 2025 and could his administration to cut spending in city-funded programs — like policing, parks, trash pickup and road repairs — by as much as 15 percent.
The mounting price tag has turned Adams, once a Biden surrogate, into one of the president’s loudest critics and resulted in a major rupture in their relationship.
The feds have provided or promised just $142 million in aid so far, compared to the $1 billion set aside by state lawmakers in Albany.
Federal officials, at one point, also promised to provide a liaison to improve cooperation between City Hall and the federal immigration authorities over the combined response to the crisis, but that position has still not been filled.
Under fire, the White House expanded the number of Venezuelan migrants eligible for work papers, provided they arrived in the United States before July 31, though City Hall has pressed for more.
However, on Thursday, the Adams administration tempered its criticism to thank Biden for reviving a clinic to help migrants apply for work papers that ran for two weeks in September — and got 1,700 people registered and in the system.
The White House, too, pointed to the clinic as evidence of improved cooperation in a statement responding to the letter from the mayors — and said the revived center would be able to handle 300 migrants a day.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting local jurisdictions hosting recently arrived migrants and we will continue working to deliver support in every way we can,” said White House spokesman Angelo Fernandez Hernandez.
“Starting this week, the Biden-Harris Administration, in partnership with New York City and New York State, will be scaling operations of its first-of-its-kind work authorization clinic to help thousands of migrants living in New York’s shelter system apply for work permits,” he added.
