Fewer migrants are crossing the U.S. border, but that hasn’t slowed influx to NYC

Fewer migrants have been crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, but even more are coming to New York, fueling the city’s eye-popping new spending projections on asylum-seekers services – over $12 billion through the end of June 2025.

“That’s what’s made it so hard for us to be able to keep up with finding (shelter) options where we would place people,” Ted Long, a senior vice president in the city’s hospital system, told a City Council oversight hearing on Thursday.

The accelerating pace of new arrivals was one of the main takeaways in a week jam-packed with new developments on the migrants’ front in the city, where some 100,000 asylum-seekers have landed since spring a year ago. More is in the works, as the city in coming days is poised to open two new emergency shelter spaces.

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams announced the new spending projections, and city agency leaders told councilmembers more migrants could end up sleeping on the sidewalk – notwithstanding City Hall efforts to find more shelter space. That’s after scenes of hundreds of migrants sleeping outside the city’s main arrival center made national news.

“Nobody’s hearts were more broken than ours when that happened,” said emergency management Commissioner Zach Iscol. “And we are still fighting every day to keep that from happening.”

The increasing numbers of asylum-seekers in New York aren’t explained by what’s happening nationally.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of illegal crossings in June was 42% lower than the prior month. Border Patrol arrested 99,545 migrants without legal authorization crossing between ports of entry along the Southern border — the lowest level since February 2021. The trend follows months of record-high…