New York City made a habit during the years Donald Trump was president bragging about its status as a "sanctuary city" and how all people were welcome whether they were citizens, immigrants, or illegal aliens. From a high moral perch, it criticized Trump for trying to control the border, calling his efforts "cruel" and "inhumane."
Mayor Eric Adams continued that tradition when he was elected in 2022. But then came the deluge of more than 2 million asylum seekers and migrants crashing the border, overwhelming the border facilities in Texas and Arizona and forcing small towns to bear the burden of Joe Biden's irresponsible border policies.
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began to send busloads of migrants to New York City trying to get Joe Biden to do something about the crisis, Adams complained about the cruel use of migrants as political pawns. Abbott tested New York City's status as a "sanctuary city," and Adams didn't like it.
In truth, Abbott's buses brought only a fraction of the new arrivals to New York. Most of the migrants showing up by the hundreds every day were courtesy of the United States government, which sent the new arrivals north in a feeble attempt to hide the crisis at the border.
Now, the mayor is well and truly stuck. All new arrivals have a legal right to shelter in the city. More than 90,000 people have arrived since last March, and the mayor has run out of places to put them.
The migrants have also become a critical drag on the city's dwindling resources. Now, Adams and the rest of New York are going to truly understand what being a "sanctuary city" really means.
Adams is cutting the city's budget by an average of 5% across the board.
The budget cuts would bring the number of Police Department officers below 30,000 for the first time since the 1980s, slash the Education Department budget by $1 billion over two years and delay the rollout of composting in the Bronx and Staten Island — one of the mayor’s signature initiatives to address rats and climate change. The cuts would also weaken two popular programs: summer school and universal prekindergarten.
Mr. Adams said in a statement that he had to make cuts across city agencies in response to the rising costs of the migrant crisis, slowing tax revenues and the ending of federal pandemic aid.
“No city should be left to handle a national humanitarian crisis largely on its own, and without the significant and timely support we need from Washington, D.C., today’s budget will be only the beginning,” he said.
“In all my time in government, this is probably one of the most painful exercises I’ve gone through,” Adams said of the budget-cutting process.
Naturally, the radical left was beside itself.
“Mayor Adams’s unnecessary, dangerous, and draconian budget cuts will only worsen New York’s affordability crisis and delay our city’s economic recovery by cutting funding for the schools, child care, food assistance, and more that help New Yorkers live and raise families in this city,” Lincoln Restler, a chair of the City Council’s progressive caucus said. He vowed that the caucus wouldn't cooperate with cutting the budget.
This is the bed that Restler, Adams, and the rest of the radical leftists made and are now being forced to sleep in. Schadenfreude's a b**ch.
Adams says the migrant crisis will cost the city $11 billion over the next two years. That's 10% of the budget and next year, there's projected to be a $7 billion deficit. There's no guarantee that revenue shortfalls will recover next year, meaning that the deficit may rise even more.
Biden will not help much. He won't go to the Republican House to ask for funds to settle migrants in the U.S., and the executive branch can do very little in the way of meeting Adams's funding problems.
Unless Biden declares a national emergency, something he'll never do, Adams and Mayors Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., and Brandon Johnson of Chicago are all going to have to go begging to their state governments for whatever help they can get.
Joe Biden is AWOL.
