What to Know
- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said his state would start bussing border-crossing migrants directly to New York City as of Friday
- Abbott and New York City Mayor Eric Adams have been in a war of words for weeks about whether Texas was already doing that or not, and whose ultimate responsibility it should be to care for those migrants
- Charity and aid groups say hundreds of migrants have already arrived in the city with inaccurate paperwork that sends them places where they can't get any aid
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday his state will now bus migrants directly to New York City, escalating a war of words with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and threatening the city's struggling shelter system.
"Because of President Biden’s continued refusal to acknowledge the crisis caused by his open border policies, the State of Texas has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe," Abbott said in a statement. "In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city. I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief."
Sure enough, the first bus full of migrants pulled into the Port Authority Bus Terminal Friday morning.
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On July 19, Adams released a statement claiming the governors of Texas and Arizona were sending thousands of asylum seekers on buses to New York City, which has right-to-shelter laws that obligate the city to care for those migrants.
Both states denied that, and said they were only bussing people to Washington D.C. beginning in April in protest of the Biden Administration's immigration policies. (Many of those being shipped to Washington have described worsening conditions, with shelters at capacity and some forced to sleep on the streets.)
That kicked off a heated weeks-long war of words between the two offices, in which New York City called on Texas to be more compassionate and Texas called on NYC and others to press the federal government to change its policies. After unsuccessfully imploring Adams to visit the Texas border himself, Abbott ordered the bus to Manhattan. Abbott issued a press release saying that New York City is better suited to handle them because of its housing guarantee.
"Public officials across the country, they need to see the magnitude of the chaos created by Biden's open border policies," Abbott said.
The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless issued a joint statement accusing Abbott of "shamelessly exploiting" migrants to "serve some myopic political purpose."
Adams' spokesman tweeted that Abbott's statement "admits to what we've known he's been doing all along" and criticized the move as "disgusting." Other immigration officials agreed, with one calling the governor a coward for shipping families — some with young children — across the country after they already endured the trauma of escaping danger in their homelands.
"What Governor Abbott is doing to play with the lives of people, it is just pure cruel, cowardice and disgusting," said Manuel Castro, the commissioner of the Mayor's Office for Immigrant Affairs. "This bus left Texas Wednesday, and we only found out that it was arriving in NYC today."
City Hall said that all of the more than 50 migrants who arrived are either getting shelter or help with travel to families in other cities. Volunteers who greeted the asylum seekers said they are mostly from Venezuela and Honduras, some fleeing drug cartels and violence.
"They are overwhelmed and tired. They have very few resources. A lot of them have lost their few belongings in the (Rio Grande) and so they are not surprisingly physically exhausted and mentally fatigued," said Amy Shire, with Team TLC NYC.
Shelters in Crisis
Hundreds of migrants have already arrived in New York City in recent weeks, with government documents frequently directing them to addresses of office buildings or local charity headquarters that are not set up to receive them.
The government has subsequently been sending the migrants' mail to those same bad addresses, including hundreds of notices to appear in immigration court. Migrants can be deported if they fail to show up.
The problem is that those papers are often incorrect — for example, sending families to shelters that only accept women, or sending people to the corporate offices of charities rather than their actual service facilities.
In some cases, that has led to families sleeping on the streets, or in cars, for lack of a place to stay or information on the city's actual shelter intake site, PATH on East 151st in the Bronx.
The city's commissioner of social services, who oversees the shelter system, said last week he was not aware people were being sent here with bad paperwork until a News 4 inquiry.
Legal Aid and the Coalition for the Homeless, in their statement, called on the city to release its plan to deal with the apparent new influx of migrants from Texas.
The city did not issue a formal statement in response to Abbott, though Adams' spokesman tweeted "NYC will continue to welcome asylum seekers w/ open arms, as we have always done, but we still need support from DC."
As of Wednesday, NYC's shelter system had a total census of 50,286 people. That's about 10% more than the long-run average shelter population this fiscal year. That said, as advocates for the homeless point out, shelter populations typically do increase in the summer anyway.
Also, local attorneys who work with the homeless say the city's shelter system has been plagued by a lack of staff, a lack of space, heavy bureaucracy and increased local demand as evictions rise.
