New York Mayor Eric Adams thanked the Trump administration for cracking down on criminal illegal immigrants, which he said has helped to reduce the stream of immigrants seeking shelter in the city by over 1,000% from the peak of the migrant crisis under former President Joe Biden.
Adams, a Democrat, has differed significantly from members of the rest of his party on immigration issues and in recent months has been willing to work with the Trump administration and border czar Tom Homan on immigration enforcement actions on criminal illegal aliens.
Speaking at a press conference Monday, Adams called the migrant crisis “probably the largest humanitarian crisis the city has ever experienced,” adding, “I am in alignment with whatever we have to do legally to keep our city safe.”
He credited the decline in migrants entering the city to a “combination” of shifting city policies and federal immigration actions before and after President Donald Trump took office.
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In response to criticism from his party and the media for cooperating with Trump, Adams said, “They are helping me with the agenda that I stated the previous administration should have been helping me with, and I thank them for helping me with it.”
As of Monday, he said, the number of migrants arriving in the city has dramatically dropped from 4,000 to just 350 a month.
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“This is what we called for and advocated for, and the American people have communicated, ‘We need to secure our border,'” he said. “There’s nothing humane about having individuals into the country with no place to go, no sponsors here, no ability to take care of themselves. And pushing the cost of it onto cities is just wrong.”
This decline has allowed the city to finally close another of its major migrant shelters at the historic Roosevelt Hotel.
The hotel, which previously was an upscale tourist attraction, became known for crime and violence by migrant gangs, including the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua, which was just designated a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration.
Adams said the Roosevelt Hotel shelter would be closing sometime in the “coming months.”
“The Roosevelt Hotel opened May 2023, during the height of the crisis, when we received 4,000 people a week,” he said. “You just got to just really think about that. Four thousand people a week. And, thanks to our policies, we were down to an average of just 350 new arrivals.”
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New York is a “right to shelter” state, which means that the government is obligated to provide shelter to anyone who has no other means. But Adams said changes to the shelter program limiting the amount of time certain groups, like single adults, could stay to 30- and 60-day periods “allowed us to get over 180,000 people out of our care and off taxpayers’ payroll.”
He said the more than 223,000 migrants who entered “went through a well-organized process of getting them through the system and processing almost 75% of the individuals that came into our care.”
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New York City also recently closed several other of its largest migrant shelters, including a tent city shelter at Randall’s Island and another at Floyd Bennett Field. Including the Roosevelt Hotel, Adams said the city would be closing a total of 53 shelter sites within one year.
“We are helping asylum seekers take the next steps in their journeys, and we are saving taxpaying New Yorkers millions of dollars,” said Adams.
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