Biden administration points finger at NY for its handling of migrant crisis
The Biden administration Monday scoffed at the notion it’s to blame for any of New York City’s migrant crisis, saying the Big Apple’s and state’s own issues caused the catastrophic mess.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in letters fired off to Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul, still provided no real local relief over the federal debacle — more than a year after tens of thousands of migrants began flooding the city and overwhelming its services.
Instead, Mayorkas promised in his bureaucratic note only vague “recommendations” from his team “as soon as possible’’ — adding insult to injury by claiming the issues solely came to light because of the feds’ brief recent visit.
“The structural issues include governance and organization of the migrant operations, including issues of authority, structure, personnel, and information flow,” Mayorkas wrote in the letters first obtained by Politico.
“The operational issues include the subjects of data collection, planning, case management, communications, and other aspects of day-to-day operations.”
Mayorkas noted that the issues with the city’s migrant operations were discovered when a federal assessment team was dispatched to the Big Apple four days earlier this month to view shelter sites — including the Roosevelt Hotel intake center.
He added that the federal government’s recommendations to improve operations would be shared directly with city and state officials “as soon as possible.”
The recommendations include, in part, improving data collection when migrants are first processed and better communication with asylum seekers on how to apply for a work permit, a source familiar with the guidance told the outlet.
“We are hopeful that our recommendations will equip the city to take additional steps to improve the migrant operations and maximize the value of our continued partnership and your support,” Mayorkas wrote.
Both Adams and Hochul have publicly decried the lack of extra assistance from the feds, arguing the city and state have instead been left to burden a national crisis.
Hizzoner has directly called on President Biden to step up and act more than three dozen times since the crisis began in Spring 2022, while the governor publicly clapped back at the feds for the first time last week.
As part of her plea, Hochul urged the Biden admin to offer up any federally-owned sites that could potentially house arriving migrants and expedite work authorization permits.
Mayorkas wrote in his letter that the federal government had already provided the city with a hangar at John F. Kennedy Airport and had since identified 11 other sites across the state.
“We look forward to hearing from the city and state on the viability of these sites,” he wrote.
In response to the letter, the Adams administration fired back, insisting that the Big Apple’s requests for federal help remained “unaddressed.”
“New York City has led the nation in handling this humanitarian crisis for more than a year, and we are grateful that our federal partners are now engaging in a collaborative process, but New Yorkers deserve the facts, so let’s be clear: Our requests from the federal government remain the same, and quite frankly, unaddressed,” a City Hall spokesperson said.
“We continue to call on the Biden administration to take the lead in implementing a decompression strategy at the border, expedite pathways to work authorizations for asylum seekers, to declare a state of emergency facilitating swift allocation of federal funds to address our pressing challenges, and to provide more funding to match the reality of the course on the ground.
“Today’s conversation also did not address the situation on the ground where thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive in our city with no end in sight.”
Hochul, meanwhile, doubled down on her calls to accelerate the work permit process.
“As Governor Hochul has repeatedly said, this crisis will only abate once the federal government takes action on work authorization that allows migrants to be resettled permanently, and we are grateful to the Department of Homeland Security for today’s informative briefing,” her spokesperson said in a statement.
More than 104,400 migrants have poured into the Big Apple since the crisis started escalating in April 2022. There are currently over 59,400 asylum seekers staying in the 200-odd city-run shelters across the five boroughs, according to City Hall’s latest data.
