Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams welcomed residents of Puebla, Mexico, while telling migrants not to come to his city during his foreign trip on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
Adams’ visit is intended to focus on the journeys migrants take to come to the U.S., while discouraging them from heading to New York City. In addition to traveling to Mexico, Adams will visit Ecuador, Colombia and the Darien Gap in Panama.
“We are neighbors. We are familia. Mi casa es su casa. Your struggles are my struggles,” Adams said inside the Puebla state legislature, according to the AP.
“There is no more room in New York. Our hearts are endless, but our resources are not,” he told reporters immediately after his aforementioned comments, AP reported. “We don’t want to put people in congregate shelters. We don’t want people to think they will be employed.”
Leading up to the trip, New York City deployed flyers to the southern border and around the Big Apple to send the message to migrants that they’re “better off going to a more affordable city.”
“We are at capacity, over 117,000. We’re still getting, at one time it was 10,000 a month but I think in the last few days we’re looking at almost 600 a day,” Adams said ahead of the trip. “These are real numbers, and I must have a local, I must have a statewide plan, a federal plan and I must have an international plan of how do I speak with people in South and Central America.”
“We’re going to tell them that coming to New York doesn’t mean you’re going to stay in a five-star hotel. It doesn’t mean that that mere fact you come here you automatically are going to be allowed to work, which as you understand, TPS was only given to those Venezuelans,” Adams said, referring to the Biden administration’s recent announcement that it would give Temporary Protected Status to thousands of Venezuelans that arrived in the U.S. before July 31.
Jennie Taer on October 6, 2023
