The city is under new siege from the border as 800 migrants poured into the Big Apple in a single day in the past week — double the usual number — leaving officials scrambling to open even more shelters.
“New Yorkers are going to start to see visibly what being out of room means: We are out of room,” Mayor Eric Adams warned Tuesday ahead of his immigration-discouragement tour south of the border — including to the dangerous Darien Gap jungle of Colombia.
“We’re getting ready to take a real shift in this whole crisis,’’ said Adams — as the city prepares to add to the more than 200 emergency shelters it has already opened to deal with the migrant flood in addition to the state’s mega asylum-seeker housing sites.
“We’re going to tell them what the real conditions are,” he said of the message he hopes to peddle to wannabe migrants in countries such as Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador.
“We are going to tell them that coming to New York doesn’t mean you want to stay in a five-star hotel. It doesn’t mean that when you come here, you automatically are going to be allowed to work.”
It was unclear how many more shelter spots the city would need to house the additional migrants, but the administration is eyeing more parks throughout the Big Apple, according to a City Hall insider.
Hizzoner’s comments came during his first off-topic-only weekly briefing where he and a dozen of his top executives fielded questions from the media — with the mayor even delaying his next event to respond to reporters.
Adams had already held an 8 a.m. meeting with officials from city agencies where an aide warned the administration would have to come up with more housing for asylum seekers, well-placed sources said.
The city had been preparing for potentially record numbers of asylum seekers flooding into the Big Apple — but the latest figures have already topped the administration’s high-end estimates of roughly 600 daily with up to 800 people a day now pouring in.
The prior daily average was around 300 to 400.
Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said the surge has city workers drowning in paperwork at Manhattan’s former Roosevelt Hotel, the migrant intake center, leaving more than 400 waiting in line Tuesday morning
“I am very concerned we have seen an increase already,” Williams-Isom said. “I cannot believe that we’re here again 70 months into this when we talking about 600 people a day, 800 people a day.
“I can’t believe that we’re still in this situation where we are talking about how many more sites we want to open,” she said.
As of last week, 118,400 migrants have come to New York City since the spring of 2022, and 61,400 still remain in the city’s care.
The uptick in migrants comes ahead of Adams’s trip to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, where he plans to dissuade asylum seekers from coming to Gotham.
“I want to give the people of those areas a real story of what is happening in New York City,” Adams said Tuesday.
“There is a public relations campaign that people are using in these areas to state that if you come to New York City, you’re going to get whatever you need,” he added.
“I want to give them a true picture of what’s taking place.”