Dec. 27 (UPI) — The mayors of New York, Chicago and Denver on Wednesday renewed their calls for federal assistance to address the surge in asylum seekers entering their cities on buses and flights chartered by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott amid the Republican’s feud over immigration with the Biden administration.
The mayors during a virtual press conference Wednesday called on the Biden administration to issue a federal emergency declaration, offer more financial support and announce a national resettlement strategy as their cities try to accommodate record numbers of asylum seekers ahead of the cold winter months.
“We are proud to have helped nearly 60% of the more than 161,000 migrants who have come through our intake system move out of shelter. But cities cannot continue to do the federal government’s job for them,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said.
“We need federal and state help to resettle and support the remaining 68,000 migrants currently in New York City’s care and the thousands of individuals who continue to arrive every single week, and for Gov. Abbott to finally stop the games and use of migrants as political pawns.”
In protest of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies and amid record apprehensions at the southern border, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March 2022 to address the issue by, among other measures, shipping migrants from Texas to Democrat-led sanctuary cities.
Since then, he has bused more than 85,000 asylum seekers to the cities of Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., according to statistics published by Abbott’s office on Thursday.
And those numbers are expected to burgeon, as Abbott vowed last month to relocate tens of thousands more.
“We expect the surge to intensify in the coming days and weeks,” Adams said, stating that at 1 a.m. that morning five busses of asylum seekers had arrived, which followed a week that saw 14 busses arrive in a single day, the most recorded by intake center officials yet.
“We are in close contact with other cities and state leaders across the country who are seeing a similar increase in arrivals,” he said.
In an effort to better control the inflow of asylum seekers, Adams issued an emergency executive order that requires charter companies to give the city 32 hours’ notice of buses transporting asylum seekers into New York, information on those they are transporting and to drop them off at a designated Manhattan location between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and noon Monday to Friday.
“We cannot allow buses with people needing our help arrive without warning at any hour of day and night. This not only prevents us from providing assistance in an orderly way, it puts those who have already suffered so much in danger,” he said, emphasizing that his executive order does not hinder one’s ability to come to New York City.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has already issued a similar order, and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said they are pursuing regulatory changes.
Johnson chastised Abbott over not only Operation Lone Star, but how he has treated the asylum seekers in the process, stating “rogue buses” have been dropping off passengers not only in Chicago but in communities as far away as an hour-and-a-half away.
“Buses sent by the governor of Texas literally dropping families off in the middle of nowhere. These families have experienced a great deal of political turmoil, trekking hundreds of thousands of miles to get to the border without real care, without real processing and without a system in place to address this crisis,” he said.
On the operation’s impact on their cities, Johnson said it has left many local economies under a “tremendous amount of duress” as they spend millions to accommodate the arrivals.
“I’ve stood up 27 shelters. We are housing currently nearly 15,000 asylum seekers, providing mental care, healthcare, educating 4,500 students, while also creating a pathway to sustainability. But we cannot do this alone. We need more support from the federal government,” he said.
“We have reached a critical point in this mission that absent real significant intervention immediately, our local economies are not designed and built to respond to this type of crisis,” he added.
Johnston said: “It will crush city budgets around the county as we know it.”
“We need more federal support to be able to manage this amount of inflow.”
Last week, Abbott signed a bill making illegal immigration a state crime and expanded Operation Lone Star to include sending asylum seekers on flights to Chicago.
