Mayor Eric Adams reported Tuesday that there has been a “huge” decrease in the number of migrants showing up in New York City every week — allowing him to begin breathing a sigh of relief over a crisis that once seemed to define his administration.
Adams, during his weekly wide-ranging news conference, said the number of migrants arriving in the Big Apple each week has dropped from its peak of roughly 4,000 last winter to a little over 700 recently.
Furthermore, he said, the number of migrants in the city’s shelter system has dropped to 63,900 from where it stood at nearly 70,000 at the beginning of the year.
As recently as earlier this year, Adams was sounding the alarm about the influx’s immense impact on the city’s finances and resources, as it is legally obligated to provide shelter to anyone in need under the city’s “right-to-shelter.”
“We went from 4,000 down to, I think, this week we’re around 700. That is a huge, huge drop,” Adams said. “I have to say there was a moment where I did not see that light [at the end of the tunnel], or that light was a train coming right at us.”
Over 212,000 newcomers have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022.
The administration has credited the drop in migrants arriving in the city with new restrictions on immigration over the southern border that President Biden put in place via executive action in early June.
Adams also pointed to his 30 and 60-day limits on migrant shelter stays for single adults and families respectively as helping drive down the number of new arrivals in the city’s care. He has defended the limits as an essential way to control the city’s shelter population as new migrants have continued to show up in the face of immense criticism from immigrant and homelessness advocates who argue they are inhumane.
“We did some hard choices, having people take the next step,” he said. “The 30 and 60-day programs, we were criticized for it, but I think that when people look back over this period, they’re gonna see that it was one of the most significant things that we could do.”
The administration has claimed that most migrants who leave shelter under the eviction policies have been able to secure alternative housing outside the shelter system.
However, an increasing number of adult migrants ejected from shelters once their 30-day stays have lapsed are ending up sleeping in encampments near the facilities from which they had been previously evicted, according to a recent report from the news site THE CITY. For instance, clusters of tents have reportedly grown around the Randall’s Island mega shelter, which houses 3,000 adult migrants, as the weather has gotten warmer.
Camille Joseph Varlack, the mayor’s chief of staff, said the city is “in the process of dealing with” the encampment on Randall’s Island. But she did not address whether the city will clear the encampment.
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, blasted Adams for both his shelter eviction policies and longstanding practice of clearing homeless encampments.
“Mayor Adams has doubled and tripled down on attacking New York City’s long-standing right to shelter policies by prioritizing shelter evictions instead of people’s ability to live safely with a roof over their heads,” Awawdeh said, in a statement. “The obvious result of these attacks is that people are forced to sleep on the street. Clearing encampments without providing alternative housing is another example of his short-sighted policies.”
