NYC Mayor Adams denounces state bill seeking to ban migrant stay limits

Migrants are pictured in Tompkins Square Park across from a migrant re-ticketing center at St. Brigid School on E. 7th St. Friday, Jan. 5, 2024 in Manhattan.

Mayor Adams pushed back Tuesday on new state legislation that seeks to outlaw the 30- and 60-day limits his administration has put on migrants staying in New York City shelters, saying his policies constitute a “successful humanitarian response.”

The bill to prohibit those policies was unveiled by their sponsors, state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz, on Monday.

“I wonder: Did the lawmakers who introduced this bill, did they go to Washington and communicate that this should not be happening to our city? This is a national crisis that has been placed in New York,” Adams said at a City Hall press conference. “If we followed that theory, we would have had 177,000 migrants and asylum seekers still in our care.”

For months, Adams has criticized his detractors on migrant policy by asking whether they’ve traveled to the nation’s capital to lobby federal officials to increase funding to the city to handle the crisis, which started to take shape in New York two years ago and has resulted in about 60,000 migrants currently in the city’s care.

Some of the elected officials Adams has criticized have in fact traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby on the issue. Hoylman-Sigal took a different tact, though, and pointed out that it’s not his job to lobby for the city there, but to do so on the state level.

“My job is to get money for the city from Albany, not from the federal government,” he said. “I’m going to support the mayor’s needs here in Albany, but I’d urge him to be more specific about how much money he’s seeking.”

Hoylman-Sigal said he backed Gov. Hochul’s plan to send $2.4 billion to the city for migrant relief, but said Adams did not have a specific figure when “directly asked.”

“He said it was a moving target,” Hoylman-Sigal said. “Some specificity would be welcome.”

Adams has contended that the number of migrants in the city’s care would be far higher if the city didn’t create policies limiting migrants’ stays in shelters — families are limited to 60 consecutive days and single adults are limited to 30 straight days.

But the policy has led to some migrants living outdoors.

In December, adult migrants were forced to sleep outside the city’s  “reticketing center” in the East Village, where they have to reapply for shelter after being removed under the 30-day policy.

This has led critics — including Hoylman-Sigal and Cruz — to decry the limits on stays as cruel.

Adams maintained Tuesday that the policy has eased the burden on the city’s brimming homeless shelter system and that no one has had to sleep on the street as a result of it — a statement Hoylman-Sigal described as “divorced from reality.”

“Not one child, not one family, not one individual has to sleep on the streets of the city of New York,” Adams said. “What we have done is working.”

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