Here’s the thing with leftists: They can virtue signal all day long, so long as no one calls their bluff. But as soon as that happens, they learn just how much reality bites.

Such is the story of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose city years ago wanted to show just how much it cared by agreeing to a consent decree to “provide shelter for those without homes.” When Adams ran for office, he doubled down on this decree by pledging, along with the other seven Democrats who ran for the city’s mayoral nomination in 2021, to maintain former mayor Bill de Blasio’s sanctuary city policy and provide services for all comers.

New Yorkers, the vast majority of whom vote Democrat, felt good about their sanctuary citydom, and they followed up on their overwhelming support for Joe Biden the previous year by electing Adams as mayor.

Things were hunky-dory for a time, as New Yorkers watched their local news and marveled at the deteriorating situation on the southern border. But then Texas Governor Greg Abbott loaded up the first bus full of illegal aliens and pointed it to the Big Apple. New York 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,” Abbott mockingly noted. “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.”

The mockery didn’t stop there. “Whoever decided to send all these illegal immigrants to leftwing cities deserves a medal,” quipped Not the Bee’s Harris Rigby.

But for Eric Adams, it’s been almost a year of scrambling to address the problems caused by his city’s sanctuary status, including $2 billion from the city’s coffers. Step one for Adams was sending the message to the southern border that migrants should “consider another city.”

Well. According to The Washington Free Beacon, “The new flyer that New York City plans to circulate at the border highlights the high cost of housing, food and other necessities that migrants will encounter if they travel to the U.S. financial center.” And even though the city promised it would take care of them, they’re now introducing a 60-day shelter stay restriction.

So much for virtue signaling. Indeed, promises are made to be broken. For a time, a relocation to New York City was followed by another relocation to the suburbs — until the suburbs declared their own states of emergency and told the city to pound sand. After all, they never promised to be sanctuary cities. The problem then shifted to upstate New York, where the Adams relocation plan reportedly tossed the local distressed population out of a bargain motel in Rotterdam, New York. Local State Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara decried the idea of “thoughtlessly sending buses with migrants to [the local motel], completely disregarding the fact that many of the individuals already residing there were struggling with poverty themselves and are now displaced.”

Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw sums it up well. “Adams has already asked the City Council to modify the right to shelter law,” said Shaw, “but they have been unwilling to do so. What they really need to do is scrap the law altogether and do away with all of the sanctuary status nonsense. These people came into the country illegally and they need to be removed. New York has enough of its own legal residents who are homeless and in need of help. That needs to be the Mayor’s priority. And this ‘sanctuary city’ nonsense has been exposed for the total farce that it is.”

Ya hate to see it. Just hate to see it when a progressive exercise in virtue signaling backfires so spectacularly.