By: Ilana Siyance
New York City Officials are overwhelmed by the busloads of migrants being sent here from the Texas borders.
As reported by the NY Post, the continued busloads of migrant arrivals into the Big Apple have peaked, leaving officials at a loss as to where to house the newcomers. The city’s homeless shelters are already beyond capacity. The plan was to open an intake and processing center as early as August 15. It would be dedicated to the recent arrivals and would include a 600-room shelter in Midtown Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue at the ROW NYC hotel. Those plans fell through, however, the Department of Homeless Services acknowledged to The Post.
On Sunday, city officials said they have finally selected a finalist to operate the future Manhattan facility– but would not reveal the new location or who that contractor is. The DHS also conceded that it has not yet rented or even selected any of the 5,000 hotel rooms which the agency had said it was searching out to house the migrants. For now, the migrants are being crammed into the existing city shelters, as well as the 15 “emergency” hotel facilities added to accommodate the summer population increase, the DSS said Friday.
“We were already facing a crisis of homelessness in New York City when the flow of these migrant families started in earnest,” said Josh Goldfein, a lawyer with the homeless-rights advocacy division at Legal Aid. City Hall has declined to reveal how much the city is spending on housing the migrants in the homeless-system hotels, however, the NY Post estimated that it could be more than $300 million annually. Mayor Eric Adams has requested federal assistance and funding for the migrants, but has not yet received any related aid from the White House. “If [Adams] can’t find a place for [the migrants] to go, it looks like he can’t manage. Throw it on top of the crime pile, and it looks like he can’t control the city,” longtime political consultant Hank Sheinkopf told The Post Sunday. “If Adams has not resolved this by the late fall, he will have a big problem. A failure to resolve this as the weather changes is going to be a real problem for the mayor,” he said.
Last week, the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs said the number of border-crossing migrant arrivals from Texas into NYC were estimated to be around 6,300 since May. That figure is substantially higher than the 4,000 estimated just two weeks earlier, per the Post. Additionally, the figure only counts migrants who entered the city’s shelter system, although that “estimate could be higher as more buses may have arrived without our knowledge due to Texas’ unwillingness to coordinate and as some people arriving are staying with friends and family,” noted Shaina Coronel, Spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
The migrants are being shipped into NYC as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to ease his state’s burden from the border jumpers. The Republican governor says it is President Joe Biden’s “irresponsible open border policies” that is allowing all the migrants into the country, and he in turn is sending them into Democratic states, where they will be welcomed by local governments who supported the policy.
