After months of demanding more help from the White House to address the compounding migrant crisis, Mayor Adams hosted President Biden’s intergovernmental affairs director, Tom Perez, at City Hall on Thursday — but they revealed very little about their confab.
Neither Perez nor the mayor spoke to reporters immediately after the much-anticipated visit.
Instead, Adams’ chief of staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, described the “introductory meeting” as a “good conversation” focused on the city’s “priorities.”
“We talked about sites. We talked about decompression. We talked about legal strategies and work authorization pathways,” said Varlack, who was also present for the meeting.
A day before, Adams announced that the projected cost of sheltering and caring for migrants would jump to a whopping $12 billion by 2025 and that the budget deficit caused by the added spending would lead to more cuts “across the board” to city services, including those presently provided to the asylum seekers.
During a speech Wednesday, Adams laid out what the city needs and expects from the federal government. That list includes helping provide more sites and funding to shelter migrants, enacting a decompression strategy of directing migrants out of the city to other municipalities, and expediting legal work authorizations to migrants.
The meeting with Perez also comes on the heels of nearly 200 migrants being forced to sleep on a sidewalk outside the Adams administration’s asylum seeker intake center in Manhattan a few weeks ago after being told there was no more room in the city’s overcrowded shelter system.
In a bid to alleviate pressure on the system, the mayor announced last month that the city will only allow single migrant men to stay in shelters for 60 days at a time in order to prioritize housing families with kids.
The thinking goes that migrants should be able to find “alternative housing” on their own within that timeframe. If they can’t, they can return to the intake center at the Roosevelt Hotel to reapply for a shelter bed, though there’s no assurance they will get one immediately.
At a City Council hearing Thursday afternoon, Democratic Council members and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams railed against the 60-day policy, arguing it will likely only result in more — not less — migrants being forced to sleep on the streets.
“I think this is the wrong way to go,” Williams, a progressive Democrat, said.
Zach Iscol, Adams’ Emergency Management commissioner whose agency has helped spearhead the city’s migrant crisis response, said at the hearing that the administration believes the policy will help prevent homelessness — but that the mayor is open to reversing it should it result in more migrants sleeping outside.
“If we start to see a marked increase in people ending up in the streets because of the 60-day policy … we will adjust,” Iscol said. “We have remained flexible throughout and will continue to be flexible.”
Since the policy was implemented in July, 913 migrants in the city’s care have received notices they must vacate their shelter beds within 60 days, according to Ted Long, a top official at the city’s public hospital network.
As the Council and the administration debated the merits of the 60-day policy, Adams’ team was also focusing on how to get help from the feds.
While framing Thursday’s meeting as merely preliminary, Varlack said it demonstrates that President Biden is “taking it seriously — as evidenced by the fact that [Perez] is here.”
That description, though, runs counter to weeks and months of rhetoric from Mayor Adams, who has repeatedly called on the feds to do more in helping the city manage the thousands of migrants who have streamed in since last year.
Biden has been reticent for the most part when it comes to the situation in New York City — a likely byproduct of his upcoming re-election run where immigration policy is likely to be a hot-button topic.
Asked if that political campaign came up on Thursday, Varlack responded that it had not.
Inside NYC Politics
Weekly
Latest news and more on politics and government in New York City and New York State.
“We had conversations about how we can get additional resources to New York City writ large on a whole host of areas,” she said, adding that those areas included the 20,000 migrant children in the city’s care and housing opportunities.
“There were no guarantees,” she noted.
Perez was planning to meet with state officials as well on Thursday. Gov. Hochul said one subject her administration planned to broach in particular would be finding large-scale sites to house migrants.
“I’ve been asking for one in particular: A large airfield, Floyd Bennett Field,” Hochul said, referring to the airfield in southeast Brooklyn.
That site in Marine Park is overseen by the National Park Service.
While Adams, Hochul and the Council have all been pointing the finger at the White House and the federal government in recent days when it comes to the migrant crisis, the White House itself was also looking outward to place blame.
“We are committed to working to identify ways to improve efficiencies and maximize the resources the federal government can provide. Since the administration’s border enforcement and management plan went into full effect, unlawful border crossings are lower than before Title 42 lifted,” said White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández, referring to the policy enacted under former President Trump that sought to limit border crossings. “However, only Congress can reform our broken immigration system and provide additional resources to communities across the country.”
