Mayor Eric Adams has a stacked schedule Sunday in El Paso, Texas — where he’ll set eyes on the border crisis that has his own city stretched to the absolute limit.
Hizzoner will spend the day visiting migrant shelters, touring a border patrol processing facility and meeting with local officials including El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser before flying back home to the Big Apple.
He and Leeser — who’s bussed thousands of migrants to New York City — will meet to discuss how the border crisis has affected the local community there, according to Adams’ office.
Adams will visit a local migrant shelter, a facility that provides services to them and a Customs and Border Protection processing facility. He’ll also visit the southern border.
Adams will then hold a press conference later in the day.
His jaunt to the Lone Star State comes two days after he projected the migrant crisis would cost New York City as much as $2 billion — double what he initially estimated.
“We have to ask ourselves, where we [were] already dealing with a potential $5, $6 billion budget deficit in the outyears. Where does that money come from?” said Adams during a Caribbean Power Jam Radio interview on Friday, a day after he announced cuts to just about every city agency.
“That money comes from our schools. It comes from our public safety, our hospitals, our infrastructure, our ACS services, those are our tax dollars that it’s coming from and we got to see an impact in every service we have in the city,” Adams continued, calling it “irresponsible” that there has been no federal response to the border crisis yet.
Adams said last week that over 36,000 migrants have landed in New York City since the spring.
On Friday, he called on Gov. Kathy Hochul — who not once mentioned the migrant crisis in her State of the State address last week — to immediately take 500 migrants off his hands via an “emergency mutual aid request.”
“We are at our breaking point. Based off our projections, we anticipate being unable to continue sheltering arriving asylum seekers on our own,” Adams said.
The Adams administration has been forced to pay $275 million in a contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to house at least 5,000 migrants as waves of asylum seekers continue to land in the city from the southern border.
The “emergency” agreement between the city Department of Homeless Services and the Hotel Association puts the city on the hook for as much as $55,000 per migrant.