Mayor Eric Adams has a packed schedule Sunday in El Paso, Texas — where he’ll turn his sights on the border crisis that has his own city stretched to the limit.
Hizzoner will spend the day visiting immigrant shelters, touring a Border Patrol processing facility and meeting with local officials, including El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser, before flying back home to the Big Apple.
He and Leeser — who has bused thousands of migrants to New York — will meet to discuss how the border crisis has affected the local community there, according to Adams’ office.
Adams will visit a local immigrant shelter, a facility that provides services to them, and a Customs and Border Protection processing facility. He will also visit the southern border.
Adams will then hold a press conference later in the day.
His trip to the Lone Star State comes two days after he predicted the immigration crisis would cost New York as much as $2 billion — double what he originally estimated.
“We have to ask ourselves, where are we? [were] already facing a potential $5.6 billion budget shortfall in recent years. Where does this money come from?’ Adams said during an interview on Caribbean Power Jam Radio on Friday, a day after he announced cuts to almost every agency in the city.
“This money comes from our schools. It comes from our public safety, our hospitals, our infrastructure, our ACS services, that’s where our tax dollars come from and we’ve seen the impact on every service we have in the city,” Adams continued, calling it ” irresponsible that there has yet to be a federal response to the border crisis.
Adams he said last week that more than 36,000 immigrants have landed in New York since the spring.
On Friday he called the Governor. Kathy Hochul — who didn’t mention the immigration crisis once in her State of the State address last week — to immediately take 500 immigrants off his hands through an “emergency mutual aid request.”
“We are at our breaking point. Based on our projections, we expect that we will not be able to continue to house asylum seekers who arrive on their own,” Adams said.
The Adams administration has been forced to pay $275 million in a contract with the Hotel Association of New York to house at least 5,000 immigrants as waves of asylum seekers continue to land in the city from the southern border.
The “emergency” agreement between the city’s Department of Homeless Services and the Hotel Association puts the city on the hook for up to $55,000 per immigrant.
