DeB runs for the border
Mayor de Blasio ditched the Big Apple for a taxpayer-funded photo-op outside an El Paso child shelter — after promising to help the hundreds of migrant kids being held in New York without their parents.
At least six people traveled on the public dime with Hizzoner for the jaunt to Texas, where he and a dozen other mayors on Thursday protested President Trump’s border policy and demanded entry to the shelter — while admitting it was an entirely futile effort.
“We fully expect to not be told the truth, we fully expect to be turned away,” de Blasio said at a press conference.
De Blasio then led a procession of news cameras to the gate of the facility — a “tent city” housing an estimated 360 kids — and tried to persuade a guard to let him in.
“Hi, how you doing? Mayor Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, is there a supervisor to talk to here?” he said. The guard didn’t respond. De Blasio refused to say if he reconsidered taking the trip and staying in New York after learning that 239 separated kids had been placed with a Harlem foster-care agency — where he spent an hour Wednesday, declaring, “It is our responsibility to help these children.”
But he insisted on CNBC that the trip wasn’t a publicity stunt, that it is his duty as an elected official to ask questions about what’s happening 2,000 miles from his own jurisdiction. “The fact is, this is something the American people care about,” he said.
Mayor de Blasio’s performance Thursday is just a taste of what to expect for his remaining three-plus years in office: an all-out effort to win national headlines to boost his progressive reputation — New York City’s needs be damned.
That’s why he turned his back on hundreds of migrant children being held in facilities here and flew off to Texas to stage a ridiculous publicity stunt.
De Blasio was one of 20 mayors who descended on the migrant children’s facility in Tornillo, Texas, and demanded admittance. They were turned away — as de Blasio said beforehand he fully expected.
As an actual fact-finding expedition, it was useless. But it let him posture for the cameras, sanctimoniously denouncing the feds for trying “to keep people out who are trying to get the truth.” (Now he knows how the City Hall press corps feels.)
His purpose in flying 2,000 miles? “To jolt the situation,” de Blasio replied — as if anyone by this time is unaware of what’s been happening at the border.
As for the kids back in New York being cared for by social-service agencies, the mayor claimed he was “waiting for answers.” Yet he was more likely to get them if he’d stayed home.
No, it’s all about the hits on MSNBC, CNN, etc. — and attention from NPR, The Nation and Rolling Stone.
In his first term, he was constrained by the need to win re-election. Now his eyes are purely on the future — his future. How is he to earn a living after Jan. 1, 2022, unless big lefty donors are willing to fund him?
That means not just more jaunts like Thursday’s, but an agenda for the city that’s purely about national publicity for him.
Which explains his sudden push to change admission standards for the city’s elite high schools in the name of racial “inclusion” — without laying the least political groundwork even with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a vital ally if he meant to actually do it.
Expect even his charter-reform commission to focus on ideas that will win national progressive headlines, like “pure” public campaign finance. (No wonder the City Council is setting up its own commission.)
This also explains why Team de Blasio simply went along with the rampant fraud at NYCHA until it got caught: Public housing is no longer a national progressive priority — far better to focus on climate change.
Face it, New York: This mayor is done paying attention to your problems. All that matters now are needs.