Last week, about 200 migrants, mostly men, many from Africa, slept on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel. Some migrants that were served by DocGo, a company that handles the intake process at the Roosevelt Hotel arrival center, have said they were lied to about the resources they would receive. Representatives of the company gave them documents that falsely claimed they were eligible to work, some migrants said, according to local media's reports. For a year now, Mayor Eric Adams has been sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis like few New York City has seen before, as tens of thousands of migrants arrive from the southern border. On Wednesday, he made yet another plea for federal help and cited a staggering new cost estimate: $12 billion to house and care for the newcomers over three years.

This fiscal year, the mayor said, the city has estimated that it will spend about $5 billion on migrants, as much as the annual budgets of the Fire, Parks and Sanitation Departments combined. Officials said they had raised the estimate as migrants continued to arrive in the city by the thousands. By 2025, the mayor said, the city could have more than 100,000 migrants in homeless shelters, about twice the number currently in the facilities, including people who have arrived since the spring of 2022. New York is not alone in its struggles to accommodate migrants, most of whom have entered the country along the southern border. Mr. Adams said he had coordinated with other cities facing a similar influx of migrants, such as Los Angeles.

The Biden administration has tried to slow the influx with new rules making it more difficult to apply for asylum, and has sent funds to cities that are receiving migrants. But Mr. Adams has said it is not enough. “If we don’t get the support we need, New Yorkers could be left with a $12 billion bill,” Mr. Adams said in a speech from City Hall. “While New York City will continue to lead, it’s time the state and federal government step up.” Last week, about 200 migrants, mostly men, many from Africa, slept on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel.

With the new cost estimate, Mr. Adams said the city was examining the services provided to migrants to look for savings, possibly by reducing the cost of meals or laundry. “Some things we were doing, we’re not going to be able to do,” Mr. Adams said. The mayor repeated a call he has made many times over the last year: asking the federal government to declare a state of emergency, provide emergency aid and create a “decompression” strategy that would slow the flow of migrants to cities like New York. He also called on President Biden to give migrants work authorizations. Mr. Adams added that Gov. Kathy Hochul should develop a plan to help distribute arriving migrants throughout the state, to ease the burden on the city’s shelter system.

“We need additional resources now,” the mayor said, adding that the city was running out of “money, appropriate space and personnel” to properly care for the migrants. Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Ms. Hochul said she would ask the Legislature to allocate $1 billion in next year’s budget to help the city. The governor said the state had already given $1 billion to help with housing and legal services and had helped find and prepare locations to house the asylum seekers. The state will pay for the cost of a new tent shelter on Randall’s Island. Ms. Hochul said she was also in communication with the Biden administration and repeated a call for the asylum seekers to receive work authorization, adding that she had “brought enormous resources to the table.”

Terminal. Last Thursday, after the Legal Aid Society wrote to the judge who is hearing the city’s request to waive the shelter guarantee, notifying her that the city was violating the migrants’ right to shelter, the city found beds for all of them. City officials used the moment to renew their pleas for more financial help from the state and federal governments. “When the doors are closing in Denver, when the system is full in Chicago, people say, ‘Let’s go to New York City because we know that New York City will provide migrants with food and shelter and the things that they need,’” Ms. Williams-Isom said last week.

The city awarded DocGo a $432 million no-bid contract to provide case management, medical care, food, transportation, lodging and security. Critics of the city’s migrant response have called on the mayor to focus more on finding permanent housing for people. Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the city was too focused on expensive “continual emergency expansion” of the shelter system, rather than investing in policies that quickly move people out of shelters.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP) — Pak-China