Eric Adams' State of Emergency
New York City declared a state of emergency Friday as the influx of migrants from the southern border pushed the population of its emergency shelters to record levels.
As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said the city was on track to spend at least $1 billion providing shelter and other assistance to migrants.
Adams and other city officials have been struggling to accommodate more than 17,000 migrants who have entered the city shelter system since April. They are part of approximately one million people who were released into the U.S. while they wait as long as several years for asylum claims to be adjudicated.
As my colleagues and I wrote last month, they include families, unaccompanied children and people from countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, whose governments won’t allow them to return. Many arrived on buses chartered by Republican officials in Texas and Arizona who say they are seeking to share the burden of a record migrant surge with states and cities led by Democrats.
The emergency declaration suspends city land-use regulations and directs municipal agencies to construct tent cities — known as Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers — which will offer arriving migrants food, clothing, shower facilities, medical screening and shelter for a few days.
Amid opposition from immigrant advocates and some local residents, Adams last week abandoned plans to put the first center in a parking lot near Orchard Beach, a remote part of the Bronx. Instead, the first relief center will be constructed in half-scale on Randall’s Island, which sits between Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
Randalls Island and adjoining Wards Island are home to a sewage treatment plant, homeless shelters and recreational fields as well as the footings of several bridges. You probably haven’t been there (I haven’t), but it was the setting for the final battle in The French Connection and is home to the out-of-the-way building that Robert Moses used as his fortress retreat.
Critics aren’t satisfied.
“This is another location that is going to be isolated and pose challenges relating to mass transit that could hinder people’s access to things like legal support and social services, as well as other resources in the community,” Jacquelyn Simone, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless advocacy group, told me.
Joshua Goldfein of the Legal Aid Society told the New York Times that the city relief centers won’t do much to address a slew of conditions that was contributing to a rising population in the city’s homeless shelters. “Rents are increasing, and too little affordable housing is being built. Evictions resumed after a two-year pandemic moratorium. Landlords get away with illegally rejecting tenants who pay with government vouchers because of understaffing at city enforcement offices. State prisons continue to discharge inmates directly into the city’s shelter system. And families who reach the maximum time limit at domestic-violence shelters run by other city agencies are forced into the Department of Homeless Services shelters,” the Times wrote.
POLITICO’s Sally Goldenberg wrote that the situation has “isolated the moderate Democrat mayor, whose political allies are piling on while he’s at war with the GOP and liberal critics protesting his every move.” The issue has also put him in the spotlight — perhaps in exactly the way that Republican governors in border states wanted.
“Basically, the mayor has been dealing with this so that the president and the governor don’t have to, but that has now become untenable,” one person who is close to Adams and declined to speak on the record told Sally. “Things have changed in that at first, this was a political stunt and now it’s become a policy of two large, hostile southern states to punish ‘liberals’ in New York for Washington’s policies.”
THE QUESTION: It’s do-or-die tonight for New York’s expansion baseball team**, the Mets. When was the last time they won a World Series title?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
** I don’t want to hear from offended Mets fans about that descriptor. Don’t bother to write. I’ll delete your note without reading it, Katie.
THE LAST ANSWER: I phrased the question incorrectly – I should have asked about the 99th associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That would be avowed Yankee fan and Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor, who has a #99 jersey signed by slugger Aaron Judge. The 99th justice, including chief justices, is Lewis Powell, who was probably a Red Sox fan or something.