The mayors of big and small cities across the country attended Washington with a call for President Joe Biden to end the border crisis, the impacts of which have been felt thousands of miles north of the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
Democratic and Republican leaders who gathered a matter of blocks from the White House lamented how they had been left to foot the bill for costs associated with the border crisis, which has resulted in well over 1.5 million immigrants who crossed the border being released into communities since Biden took office.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams identified the border crisis, along with the fentanyl epidemic and gun violence, as three of the most serious issues facing the country.
“Just a few days ago, I was in El Paso to see for myself the asylum-seeker crisis affecting our border states and our entire nation,” Adams said during remarks Wednesday afternoon at the U.S Conference of Mayors meeting. “What I saw was not a state problem or city problem. It is a national problem driven by global forces impacting regular people.”
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The frustrated mayors cited the billions of dollars in emergency federal funding necessary to reimburse cities and nonprofit groups for the costs of sheltering, feeding, and purchasing tickets for immigrants to travel to destinations across the country.
Adams slammed lawmakers for leaving city and state governments to pick up the pieces of what he said was a federal problem that Washington had failed to address since the last immigration reform nearly three decades ago.
“Every attempt to deal with this immigration on a national level through legislation has been sabotaged,” said Adams. “Mostly by right-wing opposition, and cities are bearing the brunt of this failure.”
Adams was forced to respond to the border crisis when Gov. Greg Abbott began busing immigrants to New York City last spring, as well as Washington and Chicago. Arizona followed suit and began offering buses to the cities as well as the city of El Paso through its own efforts.
Roughly 30,000 immigrants have been transported by Abbott’s buses, according to his office’s last update, which is a drop in the bucket of the 1.5 million immigrants who have been released at the border and traveled to places across the country on their own.
Nevertheless, the influx of thousands of immigrants into Manhattan led Adams to request federal assistance. He declined Abbott’s invitation last year to visit the border, but he traveled to El Paso this past weekend for a tour with state, federal, and local officials — one week after Biden made a quick pass through the city.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a second-term Republican, said the mayors told Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a private meeting that the crisis was affecting a “tremendous” number of cities, not just large ones such as New York and Chicago.
“Our call on the federal government [is] to help not just deal with the crisis, but solve the crisis, which I think are two different things,” Suarez said during a press conference Wednesday. “There’s sort of the symptoms of the crisis and the crisis itself. And I think that’s going to require a very comprehensive strategy.”
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, whose city has not seen mass migration at its border as other cities in Texas and Arizona have, said the federal immigration system was “buckling under the changes in migration,” which have contributed to the push factors prompting millions to flee to the U.S. since 2021.
“Obviously, what’s happening on the border requires action,” Gloria, a Democrat, said during a press conference. “It just happens to be that action right now seems to be a lot more finger-pointing rather than solution-making.”
Gloria called for the Biden administration to take a significant step forward by implementing a strategy to create more prosperity in the Western Hemisphere so that fewer people feel the need to flee their homes.
A bipartisan group of mayors, not expected to include Adams, will meet with Biden at the White House on Friday to discuss the leading concerns in their cities.
Adams debuted a number of steps that the Biden administration and lawmakers in Washington could immediately take to begin addressing the crisis.
The federal government should appoint one person to oversee the response to the situation at the border and create a strategy for how to “fairly distribute newcomers regionally” from the border, he said.
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However, Adams’s second point did not take into consideration that the large majority of immigrants who cross the border have friends or family in the U.S. who they travel to and live with after being released. His plan could potentially bar immigrants from reaching loved ones and send them to other regions.
