Mayor Adams urges rich New Yorkers to step up as city buckles under financial costs of migrant crisis

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is urging the city’s richest to open their wallets to help the city weather a financial storm created by the ongoing migrant crisis, days after the city unveiled deep budget cuts.

“This is a moment where it’s an all hands on deck moment,” Adams told a Police Athletic League lunch on Friday, according to the New York Post.

“The way it goes, New York goes, America goes, but I’m going to need you more than ever to support many of these organizations like PAL, Robin Hood Foundation, and others,” he said. “A moment where our philanthropic interests must align with some of the gaps and services that we are seeing today.”

NEW YORK CITY TO REDUCE POLICE NUMBERS, SLASH BUDGETS DUE TO BILLIONS SPENT ON MIGRANT CRISIS 

Adams also reportedly urged New Yorkers to “reach out to Washington, D.C.” and demand more support for the city, which he says is carrying a “national crisis.”

The remarks came a day after the “sanctuary” city announced that it is reducing police numbers and slashing budgets in areas like education and sanitation.

Adams announced a $110.5 billion budget, saying that cuts across all agencies were necessary with the city having spent $1.45 billion in fiscal 2023 on the migrant crisis and nearly $11 billion expected to be spent in 2024 and 2025.

The New York Police Department will freeze hiring to bring numbers below 30,000 by the end of fiscal year 2025 from over 33,000. There will also be deep cuts to education, including the universal pre-kindergarten program, and sanitation.

New York City has seen over 130,000 migrants come to the city since last year, part of the knock-on effect of the nearly three-year crisis at the southern border. It’s a small number of the more than 2.4 million migrant encounters at the southern border in FY 23, but Adams has warned that the crisis could “destroy” the city.

The budget cuts drew fury from the city’s teachers and police unions.

“This is truly a disaster for every New Yorker who cares about safe streets,” police union President Patrick Hendry said. “Cops are already stretched to our breaking point, and these cuts will return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

NYC MAYOR ERIC ADAMS SAYS PARENTS MAY NEED TO HELP IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS AMID MIGRANT CRISIS

“We cannot go back there. We need every level of government to work together to find a way to support police officers and protect New York City’s thirty years of public safety progress,” he said.

New York City and other liberal jurisdictions, including Massachusetts and Chicago, have called for additional federal help with the numbers they are seeing.

The Biden administration has pointed to more than $770 million it has given out to support communities taking in migrants in the last year and recommendations its teams of experts have made.

It has also deployed personnel to help with authorizing work permits and to educate migrants on the immigration system, a DHS official said. 

Separately, the White House has requested an additional $14 billion in emergency funding for border operations, which includes an additional $1.4 billion in grants to help local governments and nonprofits.

However, the crisis at the border continues. There were more than 249,000 migrant encounters in October, only slightly lower than the record high set in September. Fox News reported this week that there have been over 1,000 detected gotaways per day on average since the beginning of the fiscal year.