To offset the expense of New York City’s migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams announced budget cuts on Thursday that will limit the city’s police and education spending.
Effective immediately, the New York Police Department must freeze hiring and bring officer numbers from over 33,000 to below 30,000, for the first time since the 1980s. The budget also proposed $1 billion cuts for education, including summer school programs and universal kindergarten. Adams said on Thursday that without federal funding to manage the city’s billion-dollar migrant crisis, more cuts may come.
“No city should be left to handle a national humanitarian crisis largely on its own, and without the significant and timely support we need from Washington, D.C., today’s budget will be only the beginning,” he said in a statement.
Budget cuts are “extremely painful” but necessary to combat the migrant crisis that is projected to cost $11 billion over the next two years, Adams said.
“For months, we have warned New Yorkers about the challenging fiscal situation our city faces,” Adams said in a statement. “To balance the budget as the law requires, every city agency dug into their own budget to find savings, with minimal disruption to services,” he said. “And while we pulled it off this time, make no mistake: Migrant costs are going up, tax revenue growth is slowing and COVID stimulus funding is drying up.”
Antisemitic hate crimes are up 200 percent since last year following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The NYPD said last week that it had diverted resources to synagogues, houses of worship, and Jewish communities to “ensure that they are safe and that our city remains a place of peace.” NYC’s police union president, Patrick Hendry, said that the city’s budget cuts will hinder the force’s ability to keep citizens safe.
“This is truly a disaster for every New Yorker who cares about safe streets,” Hendry said. “Cops are already stretched to our breaking point, and these cuts will return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s. We cannot go back there.”
New York’s right-to-shelter law has attracted over 116,000 migrants since the spring. An estimated 10,000 migrants per month arrive in New York City and despite Adams’s half-hearted attempts to weaken the mandate, the mayor has yet to renounce the city’s sanctuary status that grants free housing for all migrants. An open southern border is the city’s official policy, Adams maintains.
Due to the city’s migrant crisis, an additional 8,000 students enrolled in the city’s public school system this year — the first enrollment increase in eight years. Adams’s budget cuts will slash the Education Department by $547 million this year and $600 million next year. Budget concerns will also force public libraries to close branches starting in December, the leaders of the Brooklyn, Queens and New York Public Library said.