(New York Post) Mayor Eric Adams agreed to “welcome” migrants sent to the Big Apple by El Paso, his Democratic counterpart in that town revealed — despite harshly denouncing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott over a similar relocation program.
The deal — which sees the city embrace as many as 200 new arrivals a day — also came as Adams repeatedly blamed the ongoing influx of migrants for overwhelming the city’s shelter system, which he said Wednesday was “nearing its breaking point.”
Officials in El Paso, Texas, began sending migrants to New York City on Aug. 23 while trying to deal with a flood of asylum-seekers that one local pol has said created “a scene that you would see in a third-world country.”
As of Wednesday, El Paso’s Office of Emergency Management had paid for 33 charter buses to travel here, a spokeswoman for the Texas city said.
On Thursday, The Post saw two buses from El Paso arrive outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan and drop off scores of migrants.
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said at a public meeting this week that he spoke to Adams about his decision to send a group of senior advisers to Texas last week on what City Hall called a “fact-finding mission to…get the real answers we’re not getting from Texas.”
Mayor Eric Adams continues to open NYC up to migrants even amid limited resources.Robert Miller for NY Post
The deal takes in 200 new arrivals a day.Robert Miller for NY Post
El Paso’s Office of Emergency Management paid for 33 charter buses to drop off migrants in New York.Robert Miller for NY Post
Leeser said that they discussed El Paso’s relocation program and that he told Adams most of the migrants being sent to New York were from Venezuela.
“We’re very thankful to Mayor Adams from New York that really stepped up to help us and, you know, he did tell me when I, when I spoke with him that there is not a community there within New York from Venezuela,” Leeser said at an El Paso City Council work session Monday.
“But he will welcome them into his community and then work with them to get them to a community where there is, there are peers, so they can continue to be there and that’s really important to him.”
Leeser said the influx of migrants to El Paso was “very manageable” when “we had two, three hundred a day.”
“Now, we have 1,400 a day. It’s easy math: multiply 1,400 times 30 and that’s 42,000 in a month period. So that’s a really big number and we need assistance,” he said.
Leeser also said that “the mayor of New York has been very proactive with us and we’ve had the ability to talk to the mayor of New York.”
He has actually sent four people to El Paso to make sure that they understood the process,” Leeser added.
Adams’ administration first found out that busloads of migrants were arriving from El Paso late last month, the El Paso Matters website reported at the time.
In April, Abbott began sending migrants to Washington, DC, to protest what he calls President Biden’s “irresponsible open-border policies” and their impact on border communities in the Lone Star State.
