New York’s Mexican Standoff
The mayor blames the governor, who in turn blames the mayor, and they both blame the Biden administration, which puts the blame back on New York.
New Yorkers have evidently had enough. According to a recent Siena College poll, some 82% of New York residents say that the influx of illegal aliens into the state is a problem, with 54% of respondents calling it “very serious.”
New York City has been the epicenter for the state’s migrant influx, with more than 100,000 having arrived in the Big Apple since the spring of 2022. Admittedly, a small part of that is thanks to red-state governors like Texas’s Greg Abbott busing illegal aliens to self-declared “sanctuary” jurisdictions like New York.
As the number of migrants has grown, the strain put upon city and state welfare services has significantly increased. Struggling to manage the situation and provide shelter for these migrants, NYC Mayor Eric Adams has increasingly gotten fed up with what he sees as little help from Albany. With protests over the growing crisis increasing in the city, Adams called out Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul for not spreading the burden to other counties and cities around the state.
Meanwhile, Hochul blamed Adams for failing to provide enough housing for the migrants after he sent a number of busloads of migrants upstate, resulting in at least one incident of patrons getting kicked out of a motel in order to house illegal aliens.
With tensions mounting, both the governor and mayor have called on the Biden administration for help. What they got back was anything but.
Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sent a letter that amounted to little more than a backhanded reprimand. It contained “advice” like improving data collection when processing migrants and ensuring better communication with asylum seekers. Of course, those suggestions ignore the fact that illegal aliens have almost no paperwork or identity records by which to process them, and most of them don’t speak English.
Not to mention that Biden’s administration never should have let them illegally cross the border in the first place.
A spokesman for Adams responded to Mayorkas’s “recommendations” by stating, “This is a humanitarian crisis of a national proportion that [the Biden administration has] been able to manage, but the dam has, it has broken.” He added: “New Yorkers deserve the facts, so let’s be clear: Our requests from the federal government remain the same, and quite frankly, unaddressed.”
Clearly, Adams is none too happy with the Biden administration’s blame-shifting over this migrant crisis, a crisis Biden is entirely responsible for creating. Indeed, all Biden would need to do is direct and empower the Border Patrol to once again do what it was created to do in the first place — enforce America’s border laws. Furthermore, begin immediately deporting migrants who illegally enter the country, and end the dubious “asylum seeker” designation for illegal migrants while relocating them around the country to await hearings for which many don’t bother showing up.
Meanwhile, down at the border, an average of 7,000 migrants are illegally entering the country every day. Barack Obama’s HHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, once said 1,000 daily crossings “overwhelms the system” and declared that we’re “truly in a crisis” at 4,000 per day.
Moreover, with these lawbreakers comes higher crime rates. In Texas alone, since 2011, illegal aliens account for over 430,000 criminal offenses.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, his focus on illegal immigration and border enforcement saw the number of criminal illegal alien arrests decrease year over year. In FY2017, Customs and Border Patrol made over 8,000 arrests. In FY2018, that number dropped to 6,698, and by FY2020 it was down to 2,438. Those figures coincide with fewer and fewer illegal border crossings. However, after Biden took over, those number went in the opposite direction, as 10,763 criminal aliens were arrested in FY2021.
New York Democrat leaders are pointing fingers at each other, but they’re also increasingly pointing the finger of blame where it belongs — at Joe Biden. And the more the Empire State’s voters get fed up with these illegal aliens, the more pressure and criticism will be pushed Biden’s way.