The relentless influx of migrants pouring into the Big Apple has now surged to an average of 600 per day, double what it was a year ago.
Frustrated city officials said Wednesday an uptick in buses being sent from Texas is only exacerbating the already out-of-control crisis.
“In recent days, we are seeing a significant surge in arrivals,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said during a City Hall briefing on the migrant crisis.
“It is a very frustrating moment for all New Yorkers, as we have been responding to this crisis, managing the inflow – and here we are again seeing spikes in arrival numbers.”
About 3,700 migrants flooded the city in the week ending Oct. 1, officials said — adding to the more than 118,400 asylum seekers that have arrived since the spring of 2022.
The mood in City Hall has changed significantly from September 2022 when mayor Adams was welcoming up to 200 migrants a day bused from El Paso.
The number has continued rising ever since and a few months ago had increased to 300 to 400 migrants a day.
But Adams administration officials — already bracing for even more potentially record-breaking arrivals in coming weeks — warned it was becoming “increasingly difficult” to predict numbers as Texas has tripled the number of buses it’s sent to Gotham in recent weeks.
The Big Apple received 27 chartered migrant buses from the Lone Star state the week of Sept. 25 — up from the 10 sent the week of Sept. 11, according to City Hall’s figures.
Between six to eight buses arrived on Tuesday alone — and more were expected through Wednesday, according to Mayor Adams’ Chief of Staff, Camille Joseph Varlack.
“These buses are on top of the hundreds of people coming into New York City in all of the other ways — regular commercial buses, planes, trains,” Varlack told the briefing.
The bus tallies include those sent by both Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrat-run El Paso, which recently resumed sending buses using federal aid money.
Varlack said Abbott last week centralized the state’s dispatch of the buses to the Texas Division of Emergency Management — a change she said “means we no longer even get a scant heads-up.”
“Without this information it makes it increasingly difficult for us to calculate on a day-to-day basis what our capacity is and our ability to respond is even more challenged,” she said.
“We are not receiving the cooperation or the information that we need from our counterparts across the country,” Varlack continued. “This is not sustainable.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and mayor Adams both support revoking the city’s ‘right to shelter’ law which guarantees a bed to anyone in need.
Hochul said last month: “We have to let people know that if you’re thinking of coming to New York, we are truly out of space,” adding of the rule, “never was it envisioned being an unlimited universal right, or obligation on the city, to house literally the entire world.”
The uptick in daily arrivals and buses also comes as Mayor Adams headed to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia Wednesday in a bid to dissuade migrants from coming to an already overwhelmed Big Apple.
“We’re going to tell them what the real conditions are,” Adams said — as the city scrambles to add to the more than 200 emergency shelters it has already opened to deal with migrant influx.
“We are going to tell them that coming to New York doesn’t mean you [will] stay in a five-star hotel. It doesn’t mean that when you come here, you automatically are going to be allowed to work.”