For a year now, Mayor Eric Adams has been sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis like few New York City has seen before, as tens of thousands of migrants arrive from the southern border.
On Wednesday, he made yet another plea for federal help and cited a staggering new cost estimate: $12 billion to house and care for the newcomers over three years.
This fiscal year, the mayor said, the city has estimated that it will spend about $5 billion on migrants, more than the annual budgets of the Fire, Parks and Sanitation Departments combined.
Officials said they had raised the estimate as migrants continued to arrive in the city by the thousands. By 2025, the mayor said, the city could have more than 100,000 migrants in homeless shelters, about twice the number currently in the facilities, including people who have arrived since the spring of 2022.
New York is not alone in its struggles to accommodate migrants, most of whom have entered the country along the southern border. Mr. Adams said he had coordinated with other cities facing a similar influx of migrants, such as Los Angeles. President Biden has tried to slow the influx with new rules making it more difficult to apply for asylum.
“If we don’t get the support we need, New Yorkers could be left with a $12 billion bill,” Mr. Adams said in a speech from City Hall. “While New York City will continue to lead, it’s time the state and federal government step up.”
With the new cost estimate, Mr. Adams said the city was examining the services provided to migrants to look for savings, possibly by reducing the cost of meals or laundry.
“Some things we were doing, we’re not going to be able to do,” Mr. Adams said.
The mayor repeated a call he has made many times over the last year: asking the federal government to declare a state of emergency, provide emergency aid and create a “decompression” strategy that would slow the flow of migrants to cities like New York. He also called on President Biden to give migrants work authorizations.
Mr. Adams added that Gov. Kathy Hochul should develop a plan to help distribute arriving migrants throughout the state, to ease the burden on the city’s shelter system.
“We need additional resources now,” the mayor said, adding that the city was running out of “money, appropriate space and personnel” to properly care for the migrants.
Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Ms. Hochul said she would ask the Legislature to allocate $1 billion in next year’s budget to help the city. The governor said the state had already given $1 billion to help with housing and legal services and had helped find and prepare locations to house the asylum seekers. The state will pay for the cost of a new tent shelter on Randall’s Island.
Ms. Hochul said she was also in communication with the Biden administration and repeated a call for the asylum seekers to receive work authorization, adding that she had “brought enormous resources to the table.”
Many of the migrants are coming from Latin America, particularly Venezuela, where the country’s economic collapse has caused millions of people to flee. Other migrants say they are fleeing extortion from violent drug gangs or persecution because of their sexuality. Recently, more and more migrants have been arriving from countries in Africa.
For nearly a year, Mr. Adams has been saying that the shelter system is at its breaking point, and he has made concerted efforts to stop migrants from coming to New York. Three weeks ago, New York began distributing fliers at the southern border telling migrants that living in the city is expensive and that there is no guarantee they will receive help should they come, even though the city is required to house those who ask.
The mayor also instituted a rule requiring single adult migrants to reapply for shelter every 60 days. And he asked a judge to relieve the city of some of its legal obligations to guarantee people shelter.
Of the 96,000 new arrivals, more than 57,000 are staying in homeless shelters, according to Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services. The total number of people staying in homeless shelters, including migrants, is 107,900, she said — by far the most ever recorded.
The arrival of migrants, including a recent influx of families with children, has overwhelmed the city’s shelter system, Ms. Williams-Isom said. Between July 30 and Aug. 6, more than 2,900 migrants arrived in the city, she said.
In an effort to house the newcomers, the city has opened 194 sites, including 13 humanitarian relief centers, which are operated by the public hospital system. Officials said they had reviewed 3,000 sites as potential places to house migrants.
“We are past our breaking point,” Mr. Adams said. “New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not.”
The system has faltered in the past — last year, some homeless families were forced to stay in an intake office overnight, instead of being immediately moved into shelters. But it broke down completely last week after the city’s main intake center, operated by a company that used to provide Covid testing for the city, began turning people away.
About 200 migrants, mostly men, many from Africa, slept on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel, around the corner from Grand Central Terminal. Last Thursday, after the Legal Aid Society wrote to the judge who is hearing the city’s request to waive the shelter guarantee, notifying her that the city was violating the migrants’ right to shelter, the city found beds for all of them.
City officials used the moment to renew their pleas for more financial help from the state and federal governments.
“When the doors are closing in Denver, when the system is full in Chicago, people say, ‘Let’s go to New York City because we know that New York City will provide migrants with food and shelter and the things that they need,’” Ms. Williams-Isom said last week.
Some migrants that were served by DocGo, the company that now oversees the Roosevelt Hotel intake center, have said they were lied to about the resources they would receive. They said the company, which is under a $432 million no-bid contract with the city to provide case management, medical care, food, transportation, lodging and security, made false promises that it would help them find work and assist in their asylum cases.
Andy Newman, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
Jeffery C. Mays
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