THE CENTER SQUARE—New York City Mayor Eric Adams is expressing optimism that President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration will help fix the nation’s broken immigration system and criticizing fellow Democrats for overlooking the issue of immigration ahead of last Tuesday’s election.
Speaking to reporters at a Tuesday briefing, Adams said he is optimistic about the incoming Trump administration’s pledges to secure the southern border to curb an ongoing influx of asylum-seekers who have overwhelmed the Big Apple and other U.S. cities in the past two years.
“I am willing to sit down with this administration like I tried to sit down with the previous administration,” Adams said in remarks. “I’m hoping this administration will hear what I’m saying and listen to some of the ideas that I have been pushing for close to two years now.”
Adams, a Democrat, has been among the most vocal members of his party to criticize the Biden administration’s immigration policy. He said he has been to Washington, D.C., at least 10 times seeking additional funding and federal support but has come back empty-handed.
“We can’t keep kicking the can, not down the road, but to cities,” he said on Tuesday. “Our immigration system is a failure and in fact it’s an embarrassment and we have to do a better job.”
Adams also ripped into fellow Democrats for not listening to voters about the issue of immigration, which he said helped Trump and Republicans make historic gains in the election.
“This far-left agenda that I’ve been talking about for a long time where we’re not focusing on working-class people,” he said. “Some of the things you talk about are not what working-class people are talking about.”
To be sure, Adams said he doesn’t support Trump’s pledges to conduct mass deportations of illegal immigrants and wouldn’t say whether he would cooperate with any federal government crackdowns.
He also said he wouldn’t make unilateral changes to New York City’s sanctuary policy, which restricts cooperation with federal immigration crackdowns. He said the City Council would have to approve such changes.
“I don’t want to be a dictator,” he said. “I want my other arms of government to do their job. People who are repeat offenders of violent acts, after they serve their time, they should not remain in our city. And that’s the job of the City Council.”
New York City has seen an influx of more than 223,000 asylum-seekers over the past two years amid a historic surge of immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of them have been bused into New York by Texas and other border states as a protest over the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
The city spent $1.45 billion in fiscal year 2023 on migrant costs and expects to spend $10 billion on migrants over the next two fiscal years, according to the Adams administration. Nearly 60,000 migrants are currently under the city’s care, receiving housing, food, and other necessities.
