Mayor Eric Adams warned New Yorkers on Monday the migrant crisis is coming “to a neighborhood near you” — and said President Biden’s offer of just a liaison to help fix the debacle is hardly good enough.
Hizzoner spoke after hordes of asylum-seekers were captured on disturbing video sleeping on cardboard on sidewalks outside Manhattan’s historic Roosevelt Hotel-turned-intake center because the city is so overwhelmed.
“Eventually this is going to come to a neighborhood near you, and it is — 91,000 people,” Adams told reporters.
“We need to localize this madness,” he said without elaborating, including when asked whether that included using outdoor spaces such as parks to house the migrants.
“We have to figure out a way of how we don’t have what’s in other municipalities, where you have tent cities all over the city,” Adams said. “We have to figure out how we’re going to locate the lives of the inevitable, that there’s no more room indoors, and we have to figure that out, and that’s what I’ve got the team working on right now.
“It’s not going to get any better – from this moment on is downhill,” Adams said.
“I was at the Roosevelt on Saturday. And I went there on Sunday, people lined up around the block, hurting the businesses there. … We put buses there for cooling systems, but it’s just not sustainable.”
Hizzoner added that the White House is simply not doing what it needs to do, including providing money to the city for the massive influx of migrants and a fast-track to employment for them.
During Adams’ recent trip to Washington, DC, Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas simply promised up an aide to act as a go-between between the administrations.
“Having someone embedded is a good start,” the mayor said. “We want to thank them. But I have been very clear on what we need: We need to allow people to work. There’s nothing more anti-American than you can’t work! We need to control the border.”
More than 93,000 asylum-seekers have arrived in the Big Apple since the spring of 2022.
Roughly half of the recent arrivals are living in city-run facilities, which has swelled the shelter system to twice its usual size in just the past year.
The city’s Department of Homeless Services, public hospitals corporation and Office of Emergency Management have opened nearly 200 emergency facilities to house the arrivals.
Yet the crisis spilled out into glaring public view again Monday in front of the Roosevelt near Grand Central Terminal.
The city has leased out the hotel as an intake center and to provide temporary housing to families — but the strains on the system were reflected in the sobering pictures and footage showing the sleeping migrants on the ground outside.
Already, officials have outlined plans to set up a temporary facility in the parking lot of the state-owned Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.
Some of the asylum-seekers stuck outside the Roosevelt told The Post they had been waiting days for beds, which City Hall is legally obligated to provide under the decades-old “right to shelter” court settlements.
Meanwhile, nearby storekeepers have complained that the sidewalk encampments are crushing their business.
Adams’ budget office estimates the crisis will cost New York City approximately $4.3 billion over its first two years. Biden has provided or promised just $143 million, a fraction of the $1 billion aid package delivered by Albany.
And the mayor is not alone in his anger about the liaison and the White House’s deaf ear.
The paltry offer left Democrats typically supportive of the Dem president fuming, with one remarking in a front-page Post story over the weekend that the White House was borrowing a page from former President Gerald Ford when he famously told New York City to “Drop Dead” in 1975 over trying to get federal funds to bail it out.
Angry lawmakers rallied outside of City Hall shortly after Adams’ press conference Monday to push Biden.
“All we’re asking is for the federal government to finally show up,” said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.
