Officials in a New York county located thousands of miles from the U.S.-Mexico border declared a state of emergency after New York City officials decided to approve a plan to send illegal immigrants there.
Rockland County Executive Ed Day said in a statement on Saturday that some 340 illegal immigrant males are expected to be sent to a hotel in Orangeburg for a four-month period. Rockland County is located about 2,000 miles from the Texas-Mexico border.
“This county already has a housing crisis due to the lack thereof and lack of affordable housing options,” Day’s statement said. “Sending busloads of people to this county that does not have the infrastructure to care for them will only compound that issue tenfold while straining support systems that are already at a breaking point.”
He noted that New York City declared itself a sanctuary city in December 2016 in “committing itself to supporting undocumented individuals while this County has not for the simple fact that we are one tenth the population of New York City and incapable of receiving and sustaining the volume of undocumented migrants Mayor Eric Adams intends to send over,” according to his statement.
Day, a Republican, added that the “crisis is so extreme that Rockland has been unprecedently deputized by the State of New York to take over Building and Fire Code enforcement in the Village of Spring Valley.”
Under the state of emergency, it will prohibit “other municipalities from bringing and housing people in Rockland County,” adding that it will prohibit “hotels from housing immigrants without a license. The State of Emergency is effective May 6, 2023, and will remain in effect for 30 days, at which time it may be extended.”
Officials in New York City told the New York Post that Day is exaggerating the numbers of illegal immigrants who might be sent to Orangeburg. They said that at most, 300 illegal aliens total would have the choice to be housed in Rockland or Orange County, located nearby.
“Mayor Eric Adams is criticizing Congress for their failure to establish a strategy for each migrant before they enter into the country, ensuring this crisis is dealt with in a coordinated manner, and then does the exact opposite—shipping new arrivals to other municipalities that do not have the infrastructure to support them,” Day told the Rockland Report news outlet. “It’s the same as tossing people into the middle of the ocean with nowhere to swim,” he added.
Since last year, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants sourced from the U.S.–Mexico border have been bused to New York City under a program spearheaded by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, too, had sent bus-loads of aliens to a handful of Democrat-run cities like New York but his term as governor ended earlier this year after Democrat Katie Hobbs took over.
Advocates for illegal immigrants and asylum seekers also condemned Adams’s plan to bus asylum-seekers to other parts of the state.
“Busing people upstate for shelter is only a temporary fix,” Murad Awawdeh, the head of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement on Friday. “They will be out of sight, but it’s short-sighted to think that the mayor can resolve New York City’s housing problems in this manner.”
Several days before that, Adams stated that more buses filled with illegal immigrants from Texas would be sent to New York City. The mayor suggested that Abbott is engaging in racist behavior by sending the buses to cities run by black mayors.
Adams said Abbott is “resuming the busing of asylum seekers to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C. … it is also impossible to ignore the fact that Abbott is now targeting five cities run by Black mayors. Put plainly, Abbott is using this crisis to hurt black-run cities.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot also released a letter and criticized Abbott for “dangerous” and “inhumane” bus dispatches. “The national immigration problem will not be solved by passing on the responsibility to other cities,” she wrote in a letter, without explaining how.
