NEW YORK — Days after winning his mayoral primary last year, Eric Adams declared ambitions to play a national role in the Democratic Party. Now, 10 months into his first year as mayor, he’s been thrust into the position he coveted — but not for the reason he’d hoped.
Adams’ city is buckling under pressure to accommodate tens of thousands of Latin American asylum-seekers — many bused here by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is making a public show of sending border-crossers to New York, Washington and Chicago.
It’s also isolated the moderate Democrat mayor, whose political allies are piling on while he’s at war with the GOP and liberal critics protesting his every move.
The situation, which Adams has repeatedly labeled a “humanitarian crisis,” is the most sustained problem he has faced to date and shows no signs of abating — the result of national and international policies that he cannot control but must contend with.
“This is a crisis that’s unfolding and it could undermine our cities in a real way,” Adams said in a phone interview Thursday.
And he’s seized on the challenge to shame the partisan margins of American politics while facing an operational emergency that is testing how he executes his “get stuff done” ethos. Adams complained this week, “The far right is doing the wrong thing. The far left is doing nothing.”
In the follow-up interview, he extended his criticism to those lobbing attacks without offering space in their own districts.
He also blamed the White House, from whom he has requested aid and, so far, received none.
“I think they have been not understanding the full depth of this crisis,” Adams said, in a more pointed critique than he often delivers on the Biden administration’s handling of the situation. “This is a national problem that should not fall on [the city of] Washington, New York and Chicago. This is a national problem and it must have a national solution. And right now I don’t feel we received the level of immediate response that we need.”
The White House did not immediately comment. Last month, President Joe Biden condemned Republicans sending migrants across the country as “reckless” and “un-American.”
The relationship between the mayor and president has thus far been positive, with Adams even referring to himself as the “Biden of Brooklyn” early in his term. The two met about the migrant crisis when Biden visited the city to discuss hurricane aid for Puerto Rico last month, and their staffs are in constant contact, according to City Hall officials.
But the mayor and those close to him are growing frustrated as he takes heat from all sides and contends daily with the challenge of housing so many new arrivals to New York.
“Basically, the mayor has been dealing with this so that the president and the governor don’t have to, but that has now become untenable,” said one person who is close to Adams and declined to speak on the record. “Things have changed in that at first, this was a political stunt and now it’s become a policy of two large, hostile southern states to punish ‘liberals’ in New York for Washington’s policies.”
Eduardo Garcia, from Venezuela, stands with crutches, surrounded by his family outside the Catholic Charities headquarters, in New York, on Aug. 16, 2022.
