New York City Mayor Eric Adams will visit Latin America this week and personally tell potential migrants not to come to New York City.
Adams, a Democrat, is leaving on Wednesday for a four-day trip to Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador, where he said he would deliver a strong message discouraging migrants from making the journey to New York.
“We want to give people a true picture of what is here,” Adams said Tuesday at a press briefing. “We are at capacity.”
The mayor said he plans to do radio and television interviews to discourage migrants from coming.
“We need to counteract those forms of communications that are basically saying ‘You come to the City of New York, you’re going to automatically have a job, you’re going to be in a five-star hotel,’” Adams said.
“It would be foolish for me to sit back and not try to stop this on a local, state, national, and international level,” the mayor said.
New York City is attempting to metabolize the tens of thousands of illegal migrants who have streamed into the city over the past year.
Since last year, more than 117,000 migrants have arrived, many of whom are still being housed on the city’s dime, causing New York City’s homeless shelter capacity to reach its limits and forcing the city to open new facilities.
Due to the shelter shortage, Adams is currently trying to suspend the city’s obligation to provide shelter to anyone who wants it.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams said last month. “We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month. … Every community in this city is going to be impacted.”
Recently, the number of arrivals has ticked up even more, with 600 migrants arriving in New York every day.
Over the summer, the city even resorted to sending flyers to the southern border warning migrants that there is “no guarantee” of shelter if they come to New York and encouraging them to pick a different city.
The city has already spent more than $1.2 billion on the migrants and is projected to spend up to $5 billion.
The situation has sparked tension between New York’s Democratic leaders and the Biden administration, with the governor and mayor calling for more federal help with the migrant crisis.
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The mayor plans to visit two major cities in Mexico, first Mexico City and then Puebla, where city officials say most of New York City’s Mexican migrants begin their journey.
Adams will also visit Quito, Ecuador, and Bogotá, Colombia. Finally, Adams will go to the Darién gap, a thick jungle region near the Colombia-Panama border, one of the most dangerous parts of the journey north for migrants.
The mayor plans to speak with government officials and visit migrant service providers over the course of the trip.
He is scheduled to return to New York on Sunday.
Despite the migrant crisis, Adams pushed back this week after this chief advisor called for closing the southern border.
“We believe the borders should remain open,” Adams said Tuesday. “That’s the official position of this city, but we have made it clear there should be a decompression strategy so that we could properly deal with the volume that’s coming into our city.”