Daily Times

The mayor of New York travelled to the Mexican border city of El Paso on Sunday and declared that “there is no room in New York” for busloads of migrants being sent to America’s most populous city. Eric Adams, a Democrat, was also critical of the administration of Democratic US President Joe Biden, saying “now is the time for the national government to do its job” about the immigrant crisis at America’s southern border. The visit of a New York mayor to a southern border city about the issue of immigrants is unprecedented. Busloads of migrants have been shipped north to New York and other cities by Republican-run states. That has exacerbated a housing crisis in New York and a worsening homeless crisis in the city.

Adams’s trip to El Paso comes after he said the migrant influx into New York could cost the city as much as $2 billion, at a time when the city is already facing a major budget shortfall. In recent months the Republican governors of Florida and Texas have sent thousands of migrants seeking sanctuary in the US to cities run by Democratic politicians, including New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. Who is trying to enter the United States at the border? US Border Patrol made more than 2.2 million arrests at the US-Mexico in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last September, the most ever recorded.

But many of those were individual migrants who tried to cross multiple times after being caught and rapidly expelled back to Mexico under a COVID-era order known as Title 42. The policy was implemented in March 2020 under Republican former president Donald Trump, an immigration hardliner. Biden, a Democrat, tried to end the Title 42 order, which health officials said was no longer needed, but the termination was blocked in court. Before last year, Mexico had generally only been accepting expulsions of its own citizens along with migrants from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The number of Venezuelans crossing the border plummeted after Mexico agreed to accept expulsions of Venezuelan migrants last October.

Biden announced on Thursday that Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans – who have also been arriving in larger numbers – will now also be expelled under Title 42. Before Title 42, migrants had been allowed to approach a US port of entry and tell border officials they feared returning to their home country, which sets in motion the asylum process. Migrants looking for protection must prove they have been persecuted, or fear they will be, on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group to US asylum officer or in US immigration court.