The Political Wrangling Behind the Tragic Images of Migrants Stranded in Manhattan

As tens of thousands of migrants overwhelm New York City’s shelter system, Mayor Eric Adams has tried every tactic to enlist help in dealing with the crisis. He has been pleading with New York governor Kathy Hochul for assistance, with only modest success. He has praised Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, who are both Democrats from Brooklyn, for pushing to appropriate nearly $105 million in aid. He’s blasted President Joe Biden for failing to better manage the flow of people crossing the US southern border—an outburst that backfired politically, with Adams dropped from a list of Biden reelection surrogates. Yet the city’s freshest and perhaps most powerful tool is the product of an unhappy accident: More than a hundred migrants waiting to enter an asylum intake center in midtown Manhattan last week were seen sleeping on the sidewalk. The tragic spectacle generated a wealth of media coverage and gave Adams an opening to dial up pressure for federal help. “For someone to say they think it was strategic, to me, feels insulting,” says Anne Williams-Isom, the city’s deputy mayor for health and human services. “We’ve been killing ourselves 24/7 to try to make sure no one sleeps on the streets. This was a perfect storm.”

There has been plenty to question in the Adams administration’s response to the yearlong surge of migrants. The city has erected, then rapidly folded—and now plans to install again—a large tent shelter on an island along the East River. It backed away from placing people in a Brooklyn public school gym after neighborhood protests. City Hall handed a no-bid $432 million contract for migrant case management to a company that had previously provided COVID testing. Adams has at times sounded jarringly hostile—once claiming that the city was being “destroyed” by the migrant crisis—especially given New York’s history as a haven for the tired and poor.

Yet the mayor’s team has also opened 198 sites, as of this week, that give new arrivals a temporary place to stay, in keeping with a “right to shelter” mandate that’s unique for a major city (and a law that the city has been trying to weaken in court). And the city reportedly found beds for the roughly 100 migrants that were sleeping on the Manhattan sidewalk outside an intake center last week. Since the spring of 2022, nearly 100,000 migrants have arrived in New York, Adams has said. That’s a lot of people, even in a city of more than eight million, and it has pushed the nightly shelter population north of 100,000, Williams-Isom told me. The estimated cost of housing and caring for all those newcomers is even more staggering: $12 billion over three fiscal years, according to Adams. At some point, the migrant crisis was bound to become a numbers problem, even if the mayor had handled its management flawlessly.

Last month, after a meeting between Adams and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, a DHS “assessment team” was sent to the city to evaluate the migrant crisis. Otherwise, New York’s requests have largely gone unanswered, a City Hall official says. The more progressive Democratic members of New York’s congressional delegation, who have often been at odds with Adams, have largely been silent or supportive during the mayor’s recent push for more White House help, though Congressman Jerry Nadler last week offered a mild defense of the administration. “They’re doing what they can,” Nadler told New York’s Fox 5. “Of course, the real solution is comprehensive immigration reform, which we’ve been trying to do for decades, but the Republicans in the Senate keep blocking it.”

The top priority, Williams-Isom says, is for the Biden administration to devise a “decompression” strategy for the southern border that would steer larger numbers of migrants to locations other than New York. She would also like to see Washington expedite work authorization for migrants, something the city has been seeking for months. But the list also includes items that seem eminently doable, including access to federal real estate within the city’s boundaries, such as Floyd Bennett Field, a decommissioned airport in Brooklyn.

The White House has routinely—and correctly—pointed the finger at congressional Republicans who refuse to make a deal on comprehensive immigration reform. But the president’s reelection campaign next year may also be a factor. Last December, a Biden insider told me that immigration loomed as a major vulnerability, and the issue has only grown messier since then. An Adams associate wonders if Biden’s team is trying to avoid greater political ownership of New York’s migrant troubles, so as not to invite louder Republican campaign attacks.

“We are committed to working to identify ways to improve efficiencies and maximize the resources the federal government can provide,” a White House spokesperson told me Thursday. Per the White House, the president’s senior adviser Tom Perez went to New York on Thursday to work with state and city officials on the migrant situation. “Since the administration’s border enforcement and management plan went into full effect, unlawful border crossings are lower than before Title 42 lifted. However, only Congress can reform our broken immigration system and provide additional resources to communities across the country.”

Republicans’ barrages, many of them racist, are very likely to be launched against Biden anyway, especially if front-runner Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. And if the president plays it safe on immigration, he could miss an opportunity to win over crucial voters. “Immigration cuts both ways as an election issue,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who worked on both of Barack Obama’s victorious White House runs. “Republicans are a lot better at using it as a wedge and a motivating issue, because their rallying thematic is Gotham City, and it’s all fear and rage: ‘We are under attack and these people pouring across the borders are an invasion.’ But there’s also a group of voters who are incredibly important to us who care about immigration, some of them middle-of-the-road voters who don’t understand why there isn’t a pathway to citizenship.”

The realist political calculation is for Biden to do the minimum on immigration, and hope that in a second term he’s working with solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But the humane thing—the presidential thing—to do now is to give New York all the bureaucratic changes and financial resources that Biden can muster. And on Thursday afternoon, all the suffering and political pressure showed some possible signs of having an impact: The president, as part of a $40 billion appropriations request to Congress, included $600 million for “shelter and services program grants.” Here’s hoping the money is approved, and that some of it makes its way to New York. Or a whole lot more people may end up spending their nights on city sidewalks.