New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams admitted this week that some of the illegal migrants who have shown up in the city recently are engaging in a “robbery pattern.”
Adams made the comments during a press conference on Tuesday.
“Do I believe that there are some migrants who are committing crimes in the city? Yes. Yes,” Adams responded to a reporter who asked him about the issue.
He quickly added that migrants are not the only ones responsible for the city’s criminal activity, such as the increase in grand larceny auto.
“There are people who are committing crimes in all walks of life. It’s not just migrants and asylum seekers. I think that we have a number of migrants who have committed crimes. We have a number of non-migrants who are committing crimes,” Adams said.
“And so I do not want to walk away with anyone saying that the GLA [grand larceny auto] increase we saw in the city was just migrants. No, it’s not. It was long-term New Yorkers who committed GLAs also,” the mayor continued. “But are there some crimes that migrants have committed? Yes, there are.”
The reporter pressed Adams on what data he was using to make the claim that migrants had committed crimes.
“There was a robbery pattern, for instance,” Adams responded. “We identified that this was a robbery pattern, and there were some migrants that participated in that robbery pattern.”
About 161,000 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, have flooded into New York City since the spring of 2022, and about half of them are still in the city’s care. The crisis has forced the city to open new shelters and slash the budget of every city agency, even including police, public schools, and sanitation.
Adams predicted that the influx of migrants would cost the city as much as $12 billion.
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Adams and New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul have both urged the Biden administration to grant federal aid to alleviate the strain on the city, even making trips to Washington, D.C. to ask for help.
In September, Biden expanded work authorizations for migrants, which Hochul called “the way out of the migrant crisis,” but the approval process is still extremely slow as they struggle to navigate the bureaucracy.
“You place a person in an environment where they can’t work, they can’t provide for themselves. That’s not a good scenario,” Adams said Tuesday.
Texas and other southern states have bused hundreds of illegal migrants up to New York and other Democrat-run sanctuary cities to relieve some of the border towns that have been overrun.