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EL PASO — Greater than 2,000 miles from New York Metropolis, Mayor Eric Adams stood outdoors a church in Texas on Sunday and informed a bunch of migrants that he would combat for them to have the ability to work and to “expertise the American dream.”
Because the mayor’s phrases had been translated into Spanish, the crowd began to clap and cheer.
However the mayor’s constructive message contrasted along with his troublesome mission on his journey to the southern border — he’s attempting to extend stress on President Biden to offer federal assist to New York Metropolis, which is coping with an inflow of migrants. He’s exhibiting compassion for individuals whose lives have been upended whereas additionally insisting that they cease coming to his metropolis.
The migrant disaster has turn out to be one in every of Mr. Adams’s biggest challenges as mayor. Greater than 40,000 individuals have arrived unexpectedly in New York Metropolis over the previous 12 months, straining town’s price range in addition to its system for sheltering homeless individuals.
After weeks of calling for extra assist from the federal authorities, Mr. Adams determined to go to the border. His journey got here one week after Mr. Biden visited El Paso after saying a brand new crackdown on border crossings.
The variety of migrants apprehended whereas attempting to illegally cross the border has hit document highs. The Border Patrol encountered 1.7 million migrants attempting to cross illegally within the 12 months main as much as October 2021, probably the most since 1960.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat coming into his second 12 months in workplace, stored a busy schedule on his 24-hour journey to El Paso and sought to maintain most of it out of the general public eye. Just one occasion was open to reporters: a information convention on Sunday throughout which Mr. Adams referred to as for assist from federal officers for the locations which can be welcoming migrants.
“Our cities are being undermined — we don’t deserve this,” he mentioned, earlier than including: “We count on extra from our nationwide leaders to handle this in an actual method.”
Mr. Adams mentioned he would journey to Washington this week to proceed his marketing campaign, and he referred to as on Mr. Biden to nominate a frontrunner on the Federal Emergency Administration Company to coordinate a nationwide response to the disaster.
On Friday, Mr. Adams mentioned that providers for migrants may price town as a lot as $2 billion — considerably greater than earlier estimates. Requested on Sunday how a lot he wished the federal authorities to cowl, Mr. Adams mentioned the “whole price.”
Town comptroller, Brad Lander, said on Sunday that the mayor’s journey did little to ship cash for New York and “as an alternative, it dangers reinforcing a dangerous narrative that new immigrants themselves are an issue.”
“Removed from ‘undermining’ our metropolis, immigrants have been the driving power for New York Metropolis’s success for hundreds of years,” Mr. Lander, a Democrat, mentioned.
On Saturday, Mr. Adams met with Oscar Leeser, the mayor of El Paso, who took him to go to an space the place migrants usually cross the border and a web site the place individuals had been sleeping outdoors in tenting tents.
The subsequent day, Mr. Adams met once more with Mr. Leeser, a Democrat, and visited Sacred Coronary heart Church, a shelter for migrants, in line with Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams who traveled with him.
“The fact of the scenario is that these migrants are being promised issues earlier than they cross the border which can be simply not obtainable,” Mr. Levy posted on Twitter.
Mr. Adams additionally visited a memorial at a Walmart the place 23 individuals had been killed in a mass taking pictures in 2019 and a U.S. Customs and Border Safety processing heart.
Mr. Adams has struggled to reply to the flood of migrants arriving on buses in New York Metropolis, consistently shifting his technique and his rhetoric. Town has supplied shelter, meals, clothes and education to 1000’s of migrants and their kids, and Mr. Adams has argued that migrants ought to be capable of work legally within the metropolis extra shortly.
However the mayor has additionally struck a harsh tone at instances, calling on Mr. Biden to gradual the circulate of migrants on the border and saying shortly after Christmas that there was “no extra room on the inn” in New York for added migrants. As town faces rising price range challenges, Mr. Adams has mentioned that the migrant disaster could require cuts to primary metropolis providers.
On Sunday, he reiterated his place that town couldn’t welcome extra migrants and mentioned that just about 800 had arrived on a latest day.
“New York can’t take extra,” he mentioned. “We will’t.”
Within the spring, Republican leaders in Florida and Texas started sending a surge of people that had crossed the southern border searching for asylum to cities with Democratic elected leaders — New York, Washington and Chicago — saying they had been giving a style of the border disaster to left-leaning localities with so-called sanctuary metropolis insurance policies.
Mr. Adams mentioned in an interview on “PBS NewsHour” on Friday that the Biden administration was inserting a burden on cities like New York.
Saying that 36,000 individuals had appeared “on our doorsteps,” he mentioned that “we did what any New Yorker would do — we supplied for them not solely housing, a spot for them to sleep, with meals, well being care; we educated a considerable variety of kids, and we’re additionally offering the required psychological well being assist that’s wanted.”
“However we’d like assist,” he added.
Mr. Adams traveled to El Paso with a small group of advisers that included Camille Joseph Varlack, his new chief of workers; Zachary Iscol, his commissioner for emergency administration; and Manuel Castro, his commissioner of immigrant affairs. Mr. Iscol helped oversee the creation of an enormous housing heart for migrants on Randalls Island that has since closed; Mr. Castro has welcomed arriving migrants on the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.
At Sacred Coronary heart Church in El Paso on Sunday, a crowd of about 40 migrants gathered outdoors after they heard that the mayor was visiting. One girl held a swaddled child, and one other girl fed a toddler rice and beans as they waited to see him. One individual requested aloud if he was there at hand out papers to permit migrants to journey to New York.
Mr. Adams stopped to speak with the group and requested one man how he had realized about New York Metropolis.
“Solely in motion pictures and tv,” the person mentioned in Spanish, and the mayor laughed.
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