Gov. Hochul backs NYC Mayor Adams’ migrant bus order; Adams urges NJ to join him

NEW YORK — Gov. Hochul on Tuesday expressed support for strict limits Mayor Eric Adams has placed on asylum seeker-filled charter buses entering New York City — and called a workaround Texas has apparently used to send city-bound migrants to New Jersey “frustrating.”

Both she and Adams suggested in separate news briefings that municipalities in New Jersey now serving as drop-off points should consider their own rules to limit when the buses can arrive, with Adams saying those towns could issue executive orders similar to one he introduced last week.

Over the weekend, about a dozen migrant buses arrived in New Jersey, emptying their travelers onto city-bound trains. The arrivals are the latest in a deluge of buses — many of which have been directed north by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — that has resulted in an estimated 160,000 migrants flowing into New York City since 2022.

The diverting of buses to New Jersey comes after the Adams administration introduced an executive order last week limiting migrant bus arrivals to 210-minute windows on weekday mornings, saying that allowing the buses to show up without warning at any time was injecting chaos into the city’s processing of asylum seekers.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s office declined to comment.

“Everyone that has that train line that leads into the city, everyone in the municipalities around us — they should do the same (executive order),” Adams said.

“We’re dealing with a person who just wants to disrupt,” he continued in a reference to Abbott. “This is not about raising attention on an issue. This is a mean-spirited way of using people and disrupting municipalities … We’re dealing with a bully right now.”

When asked whether he’s exploring the possibility of using the NYPD to help enforce his executive order in New Jersey, Adams didn’t deny it, saying that “everything is on the table that is in conformity with the law.”

A spokeswoman for Abbott, Haley Crow, said in a Tuesday statement that “Texas is still only transporting migrants to the final destinations of DC, NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and LA.” She did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the New Jersey buses.

The city’s new executive order has drawn criticism from some who say that rather than reducing the chaos, it has inflamed it, leaving aid groups in the dark about the flow of migrants that now could come in large groups on trains from the suburbs.

But Hochul, a political ally of Adams, said, “I absolutely support what the mayor did — I thought it made sense.”

She also seconded Adams’ call for New Jersey to follow his lead by issuing its own executive order.

“It may be necessary for our neighboring states to do the same,” Hochul, a moderate Democrat, said at her own Manhattan news conference. “If the governor of Texas is going to spend his nights trying to thwart our rules in our city, then we’ll find other ways to address it.”

She said Adams is “trying to just manage an extreme situation” and called the number of migrants arriving in New York “untenable” and “unsustainable” — rhetoric similar to what Adams has been saying for months.

The migrant crisis has proven to put a huge strain on the city’s budget. The city’s unique right-to-shelter law, which requires the government to provide shelter to anyone who requests it within a proscribed time frame, appears to be pushing many of the migrants to head to the five boroughs.

Both the mayor’s office and the governor’s office have pushed to weaken that rule in Manhattan Supreme Court, an effort that has landed the parties in mediation with the Legal Aid Society.

Adams once again criticized the city’s right-to-shelter decree Tuesday, saying such a policy is not being utilized for its original purpose.

Adams initially confused the city’s right-to-shelter policy with its sanctuary city status — a policy that precludes the city from aiding the federal immigration officials in certain situations — during a TV interview Tuesday morning.

“If I said ‘sanctuary city,’ I want to be clear, I’m talking about right to shelter,” he said. “We don’t believe right to shelter should apply to a humanitarian crisis.”

Adams’ chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said that it’s that law — not the city’s sanctuary city status — that Abbott has attempted to exploit amid a broader debate over U.S. immigration policy. She noted that Abbott has also bused migrants to other northern cities like Chicago and Denver that do not have right-to-shelter laws on the books.

“I think there’s an intentional conflating of terms,” she said. “Let’s be clear. The state of Texas is purposefully sending thousands of migrants to cold locations who have no system or legal requirement to provide a right to shelter.”

Texas has claimed to have bused more than 33,000 migrants to New York since the summer of 2022. It embarked upon the controversial busing effort, in part, to bring attention to an influx of crossings on the southwestern border.

Adams has responded by accusing Texas of mistreating the migrants and failing to communicate on its busing efforts with New York.

Abbott’s office said last week that Texas had also sent more than 28,000 migrants to Chicago. The Illinois city, which like New York is led by a Democrat, has also limited when migrant buses can arrive.

In Chicago, buses are permitted to arrive from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. New York City’s window lasts from 8:30 a.m. to noon. The Big Apple’s order also requires that 32-hours notice be given before incoming busloads of migrants arrive within the five boroughs.

Zornberg said Tuesday that Abbott’s efforts to circumvent those terms are “bonkers” and that so far “not one bus from Texas has complied.”

She added that the city will continue to “explore every possible option” when it comes to the current situation and that bus companies are “exposing” themselves by seeking to evade the city’s executive order.

Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Adams, noted that violating the order could result in fines and buses being impounded.

Some advocates have said the city’s executive order is so far doing the opposite of its stated intention.

Power Malu, founder of Artists-Athletes-Activists, a group that has helped welcome migrants to New York City, told the Daily News on Monday that before the order, his group was able to “welcome the buses and help transport the migrants safely to the intake center” at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown.

Now, he added, families have arrived at the hotel “on foot and hungry at all hours of the night.”

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