CITY SPENDS $4.6M A DAY ON MIGRANT CARE
Official says it is ‘not sustainable’ as Washington has given just $8M in aid
Mayor Adams’ administration is shelling out an average of nearly $5 million per day on housing and feeding migrants amid an ongoing surge in asylum seekers arriving from the U.S. southern border, according to a Daily News analysis.
Zach Iscol, Adams’ emergency management commissioner, said at a City Council hearing Friday that the administration is on average spending $363 per day on room and board for every person in its care. But later, Adams spokeswoman Kate Smart said the rate is a dollar higher — and that it applies to every asylum-seeking household in the city’s care, not to every individual.
In total, there are currently about 12,700 migrant households in the city’s shelters and Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, commonly known as HERRCs, according to Adams’ office.
Based on the $364 daily rate, that means the city is on average spending $4.62 million every day on housing and food for those 12,700 households.
“This is not sustainable,” Iscol said of the city’s ballooning migrant crisis tab, which now tops $500 million.
The city has largely shouldered the financial burden of the migrant crisis alone since thousands of mostly Latin American asylum seekers started arriving last spring, many of them fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. The federal government has thus far only forked over about $8 million in migrant-related aid to the city, according to Adams’ administration.
Roughly 8,000 migrant individuals are housed in the city’s eight HERRCs, according to Iscol. Another 22,000 migrants are in the shelter system.
Seven of the HERRCs are running out of hotels, and the eighth one is in a Brooklyn Cruise Terminal warehouse on the Red Hook waterfront.
According to Iscol, the administration had spent $141 million on the HERRCs alone as of the end of January. First Deputy Homeless Services Commissioner Molly Park, who was also at the hearing, said her agency had spent $313 million as of the same time frame on accommodating migrants.
The Adams officials at Friday’s hearing said the city needs a lot more help from the feds and Gov. Hochul, noting that the administration estimates it could spend as much as $1.4 billion on the migrant crisis this fiscal year alone. Hochul has deployed National Guard troops to help with migrant response logistics, and provided some legal resources for asylum seekers.
Queens Councilwoman Julie Won, a Democrat who chairs the contracts committee, agreed the city needs more assistance — especially from Hochul.
“She can’t just be our governor when it’s convenient,” she told Iscol. “I agree with you that our state partners and our federal partners need to step up.”
Another cost issue that came up in the hearing was how much the city is spending on food for migrants.
Dr. Ted Long, a top official