Mayor Eric Adams abruptly called off his Washington DC trip Thursday morning where he was expected to meet with White House officials over the worsening migrant crisis.
Adams was slated to join Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to hold talks with “senior White House officials” behind closed doors — but minutes before the meeting the Big Apple mayor canceled his entire schedule at the nation’s capital, which included meetings on Capitol Hill over the crisis.
A City Hall spokesman, Charles Lutvak, didn’t disclose what caused the mayor’s last-minute return to NYC, only saying “he is coming back to deal with a matter.”
It was unclear if the matter was personal or city-related.
Adams posted a video on social media just after 7:40 a.m. saying he was flying down to address the “real issue” of the asylum seekers.
The meeting would have been the first sitdown with White House officials over the asylum seeker crisis amid a deepening rift between Adams and the Biden admin.
The nixed trip to DC comes less than a week after Adams and four other mayors — including Los Angeles’ Karen Bass and Houston’s Sylvester Turner — penned a letter demanding an “urgent” meeting with President Biden to discuss getting additional federal aid to manage the influx of asylum seekers flooding their cities.
Bass and Turner have not joined the other mayors on the DC trip, despite affixing their signatures to the letter calling on Biden to allocate at least $5 billion in federal aid to defray the cities’ costs of providing housing and social services to the migrants.
Adams’ prior public schedule for Thursday did not indicate that the NYC mayor and his colleagues were expected to have a sit-down with the president — even though their letter dated Oct. 28 called for a meeting to “directly discuss ways we can work with your administration to avoid large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities with little to no coordination, support or resources.”
Adams, who has openly criticized Biden for his handling of the migrant crisis, previously said that he has not spoken to the president since last year.
When Biden traveled to New York City in September for the United Nations General Assembly, he took the time to meet with Gov. Kathy Hochul, but not with the mayor who was once considered his surrogate.
And Hochul met with White House officials twice in recent months to discuss the worsening migrant crisis, most recently in October, when she pressed the Biden Administration to free up more funding and send additional federal staffers to help process asylum requests.
More than 133,000 people fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands in Central and South America have arrived in New York City alone since last spring, according to the latest numbers from City Hall.
The migrant surge is expected to cost the Big Apple an estimated $12 billion through 2025.
So far, the federal government has provided or promised just $142 million in aid for New York City.
Biden has requested $1.4 billion from Congress to help state and local governments provide shelter and services for migrants.
In their letter, the Democratic mayors thanked the president for his efforts but stressed that more help was needed.
Adams and his colleagues also want Biden to speed up approvals of work papers for the migrants so they could get jobs while waiting for the resolution of their immigration cases.