New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) on Sunday visited El Paso, Texas, and the country’s southern border with Mexico as tensions over U.S. immigration policies grow.
“No city deserves this. El Paso does not deserve this. Chicago, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, New York — no city deserves what is happening,” Adams said at a press conference in El Paso, aired on local channel KVIA.
“Our cities are being undermined and we don’t deserve this. Migrants don’t deserve this. And the people who live in the cities don’t deserve this,” Adams said.
New York City has been one of the Democratic-led cities targeted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican governors who have bused thousands of asylum-seekers north from the border to so-called sanctuary cities in protest of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
The move has dropped migrants off in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago and other blue cities, straining the local systems far from the border.
Adams said on Sunday that New York City has received more than 3,000 asylum-seekers in the last week and a half and said the Big Apple has become the repository for “many rivers” of incoming migrants.
“Many rivers are coming from all over the country and they’re going directly to the city of New York,” Adams said.
The Democratic mayor said he was “extremely disappointed” in the federal government’s lack of urgency in responding to this “man-made crisis” and urged the administration to take action on immigration.
Adams also said that mayors are “on the front lines” of the national crisis and called for federal support.