New York City plans to spend $4.75 billion on resources for illegal immigrants over the next year, according to the mayor’s office. The city is on track to spend nearly $10 billion on illegal aliens over three years.
The Big Apple’s “sanctuary city” laws protect many illegal aliens from deportation, making the city a top destination for illegal aliens after they cross the southern border into the U.S.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ budget office forecasts serving 36,939 illegal immigrant households to the tune of an average of $352 per night in the city government’s fiscal year 2025, which runs from July 1 through next June 30.
Multiply the estimated costs of illegal alien households by the average nightly cost, multiply that by 365, and the total is $4.75 billion, according to the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
In May, New York City announced an executive budget totaling $111.62 billion for fiscal year 2025.
Adams, a Democrat, said about 212,000 illegal aliens have arrived in New York City in recent years, and he advocates for a clear path for these migrants to attain work in the U.S.
“New York’s migrant crisis was an entirely foreseeable consequence of [President Joe] Biden releasing or paroling millions of indigent, inadmissible aliens in a few short years,” Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told The Daily Signal.
“I would love to hear [Vice President Kamala] Harris’ policy ideas on this for 2024, but I don’t see anything here on her website,” Hankinson said.
New York City reported spending $3.79 billion on the illegal immigration crisis during fiscal year 2024, which ended June 30.
Over $3 billion of that total went into two buckets of spending: “house, rent, initial outfitting” and “services and supplies.” The city spent the remaining $674 million on food, medical, “IT, administrative costs, and other.”
In addition to tent communities, the city has used hotels and other facilities to house illegal aliens.
I visited the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC yesterday. This old historic hotel has been turned into a shelter for illegal aliens.
— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) December 8, 2023
I met illegal aliens from China, Chad, Senegal, and Mauritania.
The security guards at the doors could not, or would not, tell me how many people are… pic.twitter.com/yW2VaAzw2S
In fiscal year 2023, the city spent $1.45 billion on the illegal immigration crisis during the Biden-Harris administration. When that number is added to what was spent in fiscal 2024 and what is budgeted for fiscal 2025, the crisis will have cost the Big Apple nearly $10 billion by next June 30.
Masses of illegal aliens crowded on the streets of New York City without a way to earn a living is “a receipt for disaster,” Adams said during an interview Wednesday on FOX 5 New York.
“We need to give people the ability to work. We need to allow them to take the next step on their journey,” the mayor said.
Adams is scheduled to speak next week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Harris officially will be nominated for president. The vice president replaced Biden at the top of the ticket when he stepped aside last month.
In the interview, he said his message will be about more than illegal immigration but added that he does think “we have to secure our border and come up with a real plan of allowing people to be disseminated throughout the entire country [to alleviate] where we have population problems.”
“But at the heart of it is allowing people to work,” Adams said.
The Adams administration “has mobilized an all-of-city response that includes the work of more than 10 agencies across five service categories,” the mayor’s budget office announced.
Despite resources allocated to address the illegal immigration crisis in New York, Adams said in the interview, “I’m not prioritizing migrants over New Yorkers.”
“Migrants are living in tents with outside facilities,” the mayor said. “We have broke record on the amount of affordable housing we built for New Yorkers.”
The federal government allocated over $195 million to New York City to address the crisis of illegal immigration, but the city hasn’t received all the funding.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Daily Signal that city officials “continue to ask for more help from our federal partners, including a decompression strategy that spreads migrants out across the country, more funding, and expanded work authorizations so that every asylum-seeker can achieve the American dream.”
Since the start of the Biden-Harris administration in January 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported encountering about 10 million illegal aliens on America’s borders and paroling as many as 85% of them into the U.S.
