Mayor Adams warns NYC migrant crisis price tag could soar to $12 billion: ‘Every service must be cut’

New York City is on track to spend as much as $12 billion on managing the local migrant crisis by mid-2025 — a staggering price tag that Mayor Adams warned Wednesday will necessitate more “across the board” cuts to city services.

The new City Hall cost estimate — which was first reported by the Daily News ahead of its Wednesday morning release — eclipses the $4.3 billion Adams’ administration previously projected it would spend by July 2024 on housing, feeding and providing services for the tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived since last year.

Under the administration’s revised projection, which was prompted by a recent uptick in migrant arrivals, the city is expected to spend as much as $6.1 billion by July 2024. Costs are then set to surge further, reaching the $12 billion mark by July 2025, according to the projection.

“We are past our breaking point,” Adams said in a speech at City Hall, adding that it “breaks this city’s heart” that dozens of migrants resorted a few weeks ago to sleeping on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk after being told there was no more room in the city’s overcrowded shelter system.

On average, Adams said, the city is already spending $9.8 million per day on accommodating migrants. There are currently more than 57,000 migrants in the city’s shelters and emergency housing systems, most of them Latin Americans who arrived in New York after crossing the U.S. southern border in hopes of obtaining asylum status, according to Adams’ office.

Due to the ballooning price tag, Adams said his administration is in the process of scaling back services being offered to migrants in the city’s care. Perks like free meals, laundry and hygiene products are likely to be on the chopping block, Adams said.

“Every service must be cut,” he told reporters in the City Hall Rotunda after his speech. “Some of the things we were doing we are not going to be able to do.”

Beyond migrants, Adams said services being offered to New Yorkers are also likely to be trimmed back. “Every service in this city is going to be impacted,” he said.

Adams has already slashed spending at nearly all city agencies over the past year due to fiscal concerns largely driven by the migrant crisis. That has resulted in drastic service reductions, like the recent closure of a city Health Department library that emerged as a key scientific research resource during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The only way the city can avoid further budgetary pain is if President Biden’s administration provides Adams’ administration with more financial and logistical aid, the mayor said.

“The White House can help us now,” Adams said.

He added that the “blemish” isn’t on his administration if the city is hurled into a financial collapse. “The blemish is on the national government,” he said.

A spokesman for the White House referred comment to the Homeland Security Department, which did not immediately respond to emailed questions after Adams’ speech.

To date, the Biden administration has committed about $135 million in federal aid for the city related to the migrant crisis.

Adams has for months argued that’s not even close to enough. And Jacques Jiha, the mayor’s budget director, said Wednesday that so far none of the federal money allocated has actually materialized.

“We have not received a dollar from the allocation,” he said.

In his speech, Adams once again reiterated steps the president must take immediately to help: Declare a federal state of emergency over the city’s crisis, which would open up new funding streams; expedite work authorizations for migrants so they can start contributing to the local economy, and develop a national system by which migrants are sent to other municipalities besides New York.

Adams said Gov. Hochul’s administration should do more to help, too, including allowing the city to use more state-owned facilities to house migrants.

Speaking to reporters in Brooklyn on Wednesday morning, Hochul noted the state has committed $1 billion in migrant-related aid to the city so far.

“And we’re doing more,” she said, adding that her administration is “scouring the state of New York, and particularly the city, for locations that we can use in a large-scale way.”

According to municipal government sources familiar with the matter, the Adams administration’s new spending projection is calculated based on a recent increase in the number of migrants arriving every day.

When the mayor and the City Council adopted the city’s $107 billion municipal budget in late June, an average of 40 migrant households arrived every day. As of July, the sources said, about 100 migrant households or more are arriving daily, depending on the day or week.

Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said Wednesday those numbers have gone up far more in recent days. She put the total number of asylum seekers who came into the city from July 30 to Aug. 6 at more than 2,900, which is approximately 363 new migrants a day.

“Let that settle in: 2,900,” Adams said. “So if we continue to do an average of 2,500 a week, 5,000 every two weeks, 10,000 a month — you don’t have to be a mathematician to understand what this is doing to our city.”

If the current arrival rate continues, the mayor said, the number of migrants in the city’s care is likely to reach 100,000 within the next two years. When accounting for homeless New Yorkers, there are already more than 100,000 people living in the shelter system, an all-time population high.

As part of this fiscal year’s budget, the mayor and the Council earmarked about $4.7 billion for migrant crisis costs through summer 2025 — meaning there’s about a $7 billion hole under the new projection.

“It’s unfair for New Yorkers to carry that burden,” Adams said of the estimated deficit.

Jiha, the budget director, said the bulk of the estimated $12 billion bill consists of what the city expects to spend on shelter costs.

In a briefing after Adams’ speech, Jiha’s assistant director, Michael Chimowitz, projected that 38% of the total price tag will go to housing and rent; 37% to services and supplies such as clothing, laundry, MetroCards, laptops and security services, and an additional 10% to information technology and administrative costs. Medical costs encompass 8% of total spending, and food costs come to about 7%.

As the traditional city shelter system remains on the brink, Adams’ administration has opted to accommodate migrants in emergency housing facilities set up in unconventional settings. The administration is in the process of setting up one such facility on Randalls Island, a tent-like structure that is expected to span four soccer fields.

Some local Democratic lawmakers have raised concern about the cost efficiency of some of the administration’s emergency housing sites. Randalls, for instance, was previously the site of a migrant tent shelter that was disassembled last fall after standing mostly empty despite costing at least $650,000 just to build.

After Adams’ Wednesday remarks, City Councilman Justin Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee, joined the mayor in calling for more federal help, but also vowed that his team is in the process of auditing city migrant crisis spending.

“In times of crisis and emergency, we still must allocate resources wisely and efficiently,” he said. “To that end, the Council is conducting our own analysis as we speak.”

With Tim Balk