The Biden administration pushed back on criticism that it has not done enough to help New York during the migrant crisis in letters to Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, citing numerous areas where local officials could improve while dashing hopes that feds could offer more help getting asylum seekers into the legal workforce.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a pair of letters on Sunday that day-to-day management of the migrants and inadequate data collection are among the structural and operational issues uncovered by his staff during a four-day visit to the city earlier this month.
The letters, which were first reported by Politico, marked the White House’s most detailed public response yet to the city’s struggles dealing with the arrival of more than 104,000 migrants since last spring.
“The structural issues include governance and organization of the migrant operations, including issues of authority, structure, personnel, and information flow,” Mayorkas wrote. “The operational issues include the subjects of data collection, planning, case management, communications, and other aspects of the day-to-day operations.”
The letter comes a month after Adams met with Mayorkas in Washington, D.C. Hochul and Adams were expected to be briefed further on the federal assessment Monday.
Both Adams and Hochul have implored the White House to allow migrants to work legally while they await their asylum applications, a change that they say could help relieve the city’s overburdened shelter system.
But prospects for reform of those rules appear increasingly dim.
“We continue, unfortunately, to work within statutory constraints that do not ably serve our nation’s labor needs,” Mayorkas wrote.
The mayor’s office issued a sharp rebuttal, noting that the city had already opened over 200 emergency shelter sites and spent nearly $2 billion.
“New Yorkers deserve the facts, so let’s be clear: Our requests from the federal government remain…
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